I don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.
Keanu ReevesDo not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.
Mark TwainI’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.
Anthony BourdainI love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.
Billie EilishEvery story has its demands.
Clint EastwoodIn fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is.
Taylor SwiftMusic helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.
RihannaIn many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.
Alice MunroJournalism keeps you planted in the earth.
Ray BradburyTruth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
Francis BaconMost country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.
Dolly PartonI was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.
Haruki MurakamiOf course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
Margaret ThatcherI wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.
Angelina JolieIn a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.
J. K. RowlingThe stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
Alice MunroPeople have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.
Jordan PetersonStorytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.
Margaret AtwoodPeople ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.
J. K. RowlingWhat is history but a fable agreed upon?
Napoleon BonaparteThis was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.
Harper LeeIf you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.
Groucho MarxThere should be a point to movies. Sure, you’re giving people a diversion from the cold world for a bit, but at the same time, you pass on some facts and rules and maybe a little bit of wisdom.
George LucasI usually don’t like to ‚spoon feed‘ my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.
The WeekndThere is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya AngelouHistory is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.
Paul AusterI like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.
Alice MunroIt’s all make believe, isn’t it?
Marilyn MonroeI hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.
Elvis PresleyIn Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.
Haruki MurakamiLearning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.
George LucasI’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.
Alice MunroAs human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.
David HareIf my life was a movie, no one would believe it.
Arnold SchwarzeneggerI have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.
AuroraThe idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
Maya AngelouI love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that’s been made from one of my books, I know that it isn’t going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I’ll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.
Stephen KingImage, lyrics, content, storytelling, cohesive body of work – that’s Prince to me.
The WeekndI have definitely been curious and involved in the process; even as a young actor. I was always looking at where the camera was, what story it was telling. And as my experience grew, I wanted to know even more.
Keanu ReevesThe reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Jim RohnI now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it’s like therapy for me.
J. ColeAlmost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
Virginia WoolfI am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.
Keanu ReevesThe first story I finished was when I was six years old.
J. K. RowlingI’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.
Brene BrownThese are all personal crises, I’m sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It’s as simple as that.
David BowieI went through a period when I felt my film characters were having more fun than I was. It might partly explain why I ended up tattooed or doing certain extreme things in my life.
Angelina JolieMaybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.
Alice MunroIf you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.
Margaret AtwoodAll fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.
Margaret AtwoodI love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.
Kevin HartIt doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.
Taylor SwiftI have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.
Dolly PartonFiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.
Margaret AtwoodSick children, if not too shy to speak, will always express this wish. They invariably prefer a story to be told to them, rather than read to them.
Florence NightingaleI’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.
Anthony BourdainA novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.
Jim RohnIn my father’s generation, the product was 80 percent of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20 percent. It now seems that 80 percent of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.
Angelina JolieMemory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice MunroI know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.
Haruki Murakami