Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.
With the finale episode of ‘Gravity Falls’ our job as storytellers is to finish all the things we’ve started.
Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales.
There’s a stigma attached to being an actor. People from ‘Big Brother’ call themselves actors. There’s so much crap. It’s not about appreciating that we’re here to service the public, that we’re storytellers. It doesn’t sit comfortably with me.
I never thought about what I would write. I just come from such a big family of storytellers.
My favourite writers are always great storytellers, like Bruce Springsteen; I adore Bruce Springsteen. I feel like he doesn’t beat around the bush, and he doesn’t overcomplicate things. He puts things into layman’s terms and tells stories that anyone can understand.
There are millions of women all around the world who are in dangerous, terrifying situations. It’s up to us as storytellers to give people hope, to let people know that there is a way out.
Country music has always been about as close to R&B as you can possibly get. We’re storytellers.
I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from the day I was born.
Social media allowed us to become our own storytellers. With it, we seized the power of our truth.
What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.
Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn’t even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty – at least in the first four years of his presidency.
Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.
Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing. Actors are physical, olympian storytellers and we should be able to create entire landscapes with nothing.
I like people who tell stories. I like storytellers. A lot of my songs are misconceived as being auto-biographical when they’re not because I write in the first person.
Relish being an oddball: Well-behaved, well-adjusted people are hopeless storytellers and, honestly, terribly boring.
People have compared me to Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West, Eminem, and J. Cole. They bring substance and largely are all good storytellers, and those are two of my biggest strengths. It’s dope to be compared to people who have longevity in the game because that’s the most important thing for me: I want my name to live forever.
I’m Jewish, I can say it. We’re storytellers. We were the moneylenders… Therefore we tell great tales to get what we need. I love Jewish men. They make the best husbands.
I formed this thing called the Half Foundation, and what I tried to do is quantify hiring practices in Hollywood. Half the population is women, so half of the storytellers should be women. Fifty percent of all the directors in my company are women, and it will forever be that way.
All directors are storytellers, so the motivation was to tell the story I wanted to tell. That’s what I love.
I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters’ school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening.
People would go from village to village with their books in a time of poverty and disease. They would get people around them, and for an hour, these storytellers would change people’s lives. I’d always thought I was a reincarnation of that. That’s who I want to be.
Kids are so fiercely opinionated, that if they love the Harry Potter books and they go see the movie, they’ll be the first to say, ‘That was wrong! They didn’t get that right!’ They’re storytellers themselves. They’re critics. They’re going to have the critical opinion.
Comedy and horror are cousins; they’re related. They both come from storytellers who want to specifically affect the audience and elicit specific reactions during the movie.
My mom worked as a pharmacist, but she is one of the best storytellers I know. My sister is a gospel and opera singer and my brother, who passed away, was a writer.
I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that’s what we do. That’s what storytellers do.
Actors can be many things – vain, venal, self-serving, obnoxious, bullies – but all of the good ones are great storytellers.
I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.
I was always fascinated by the Torah, the Bible, in terms of story telling: heroes and villains, morality and flaws. There’s no better epic. Also, being part Latin and Jewish means I have a sense of the theatrical. There were always a lot of people in my house. My home was always filled with a lot of storytellers.
I’ve always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.
I think all Latino actors want to be storytellers first. I want to be an actor first, and then I want to be Latina.
I believe that all brands will become storytellers, editors and publishers, all stores will become magazines, and all media companies will become stores. There will be too many of all of them. The strongest ones, the ones who offer the best customer experience, will survive.
Perhaps storytellers don’t need to care as much about the future as executives and investors do. After all, isn’t it possible that technology will enable storytellers to connect directly to their audience without the need for anyone to share the programming decisions or the profit in between? Don’t bet on it.
I’m not sure I would make a direct connection between having press attention as a young person and being interested in the media as an older person. I came to it more organically, coming from a family of Irish Catholic storytellers. Storytelling is a pastime and important part of my family’s history and culture.
John Grisham is one of the greatest storytellers of all time.
Growing up, I wanted to be in WWE because of watching characters like Stephanie McMahon and Paul Heyman. They just are such incredible storytellers, such incredible, compelling characters.
To be a black person is to come from a long bloodline of survivors and storytellers, with a resilience that people can’t even comprehend.
It’s always an amazing gift to be able to work with storytellers who ‘get it’ and who can not only draw anything but can draw it better and more dynamically than you’d ever envisioned.
I come from a family of storytellers.
We have privilege in our hands as storytellers. We need to tell stories that reflect our world.
We’re always looking for ways to use technologies to open up new creative expressions for us artistically. So we’re constantly thinking about where something like VR may lead us in storytelling or what kind of tool that gives us as storytellers.
The old storytellers took the stories that meant something to them and rearranged the pieces to say something.
It’s time for storytellers to tell the stories that have not had the privilege of being shown to the world, and the audience will be there.
Denver’s commitment to giving contemporary storytellers the stage is crucial to the American theater. That’s something embraced by ‘Smash.’ We should be telling our own stories.
I don’t know if Jim was a major part of that or not. He is one of a small group of real storytellers. He has enormous imagination and ability to write. I’m glad he’s coming back. It’s going to be good for the show.
I think it’s too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.
For storytellers, financiers make ideal rogues. The easiest way to make characters unappealing is to make them rich – shorthand for spoiled, picky, superior, and cold-hearted.
For the most part, I was surprised by the representation of female characters onscreen. I do hope that when we include more female storytellers, we will have more of the women that I recognize in my day to day life.
All of my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass down stories to the next generation. We lost an entire generation of storytellers with HIV.
I thought I had to write literature and add my name to the list of great Southern storytellers. Fortunately for me, no one wanted to read any of those stories. They got rejected by everyone. Sometimes, I would get a note saying they liked the writing, but the story simply didn’t work.
