I would say, A, you can’t really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it’s something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.
I love Carpenter, I love Craven – these are all the classics – the Romeros of the world, but I think the biggest influence on me as a storyteller and as a filmmaker is actually Steven Spielberg. I love that even though Steven isn’t known for being a horror director, he started out his career making scary movies.
I would say that my whole career is effectively trying to be a storyteller within the context of financial news.
Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.
Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I’ve always been interested in that.
The more forcibly I’m made aware of the fact that I’ll never be the kind of storyteller I most admire, the less I’ll be troubled by that. I’ll probably just become more myself.
I must confess that although I am quite passionate about the books I create for children, I am not the best oral storyteller. In fact, I stink at it.
I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.
People don’t call them horror movies, but Hitchcock, for me, is my favorite storyteller. He was really exploring dark themes, and I don’t know what category you put his movies in. Thriller? Horror? Some of them go in either one.
I’m a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there’s a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes around, and we relate to that on an intellectual level.
I’m not a natural storyteller at all. If anything, I’m a natural interviewer, a natural listener, but I’m not a natural storyteller.
Essentially, I’m a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.
I find it quite boring when you’re listening to radio, and it’s the same kind of voice that’s on every song on the radio. You can’t really tell a lot about that singer as a storyteller and about the singer from what they’re singing.
I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.
The fact is Jerry Weintraub, the handsome, bearish movie producer, the man with the long career, who worked with Arthur Godfrey and Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra and George Clooney, is a great storyteller – he’s this as much as he’s anything else. He takes time telling stories, too.
I’m a director’s actor; I’m a storyteller’s actor.
The special skills necessary for being a storyteller are really very simple. I actually talked about them in a book of mine called ‘Tell Me a Tale.’ Those basic skills are to listen, to observe, to remember, and to share.
As a storyteller, when you’re writing a movie and when you’re directing, you want to keep people entertained. That’s the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
I’m a storyteller, and everyone in this family expresses themselves through writing to get through life’s milestones.
A viewer’s imagination is a powerful storyteller, and can often come up with things way more frightening than what you can explicitly show in a horror movie… try to engage that imagination, and the results can be magical.
I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.
Dad was an amazing storyteller and illustrator, which he did in his spare time – very inspiring and dramatic.
The film itself involves a New York City radio storyteller, Gabriel Noone, who strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, an abused 14-year-old teenager who is suffering from AIDS, who does not have much longer to live.
At first, being a storyteller, it was fun to dress up and fun to sing songs and pretend to be very dramatic – all of that stuff was just fun early on.
As long as I’m making something from my voice, from my perspective there will be Asian American content because I am the storyteller.
I’m just a storyteller.
As a storyteller, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories.
I know I’m a storyteller at heart, and if there’s a platform that needs stories, I’m going be there.
A good storyteller is a person with a good memory and hopes other people haven’t.
I wanted always to be a storyteller of the fullest expression.
I only have one job, and that’s being a storyteller.
If you were to put me under one umbrella, call me a storyteller.
I’m still not sure I want to be a writer. I think of myself as a storyteller more.
I just follow what inspires me as an artist and a storyteller, and stay true to myself in my work.
Ultimately, a director is a storyteller. I wanted to fortify that part of my life as a director, so I thought the best way to do that is to study and learn about the greatest stories ever written.
For a long time, I bought into the idea that if you are a woman who is a storyteller and a lover of movies, then the best way to express that is as an actress. Obviously, there are women my age who are directors who didn’t buy into that idea, but I did – and now I’ve broken that down inside myself.
I’m a storyteller… a preacher.
I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She’s quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is ‘The House of Mirth.’ I also like ‘The Reef.’
Without a doubt my mother was an inspiration for my writing. This is true in many ways, but mostly because she is a wonderful storyteller, without even knowing it.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Tina Fey’s. She’s a very unique storyteller and has such a great voice and sense of character and comedy, and manages to do things that are oftentimes very broad but still have a lot of heart to them.
I am first and foremost a storyteller; I want to tell a good story, and I want it to mean something – something that I think is important.
I am a storyteller, and I take great pride in the storytelling and a great joy.
It’s very dangerous for a storyteller to walk into a situation with a political agenda because you end up telling a story about issues instead of telling a story about people.
I want to be remembered as a storyteller.
You can never predict success. You can never predict another person liking what you are doing. But if you are an interesting storyteller and if you strike the right chord, perhaps you will be understood.
I’m a storyteller.
Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human.
I’m not a good storyteller – I much prefer to be with people who are chatty, to have the luxury of listening.
I don’t mind UFO’s and ghost stories, it’s just that I tend to give value to the storyteller rather than to the story itself.
I feel like I’m a professional storyteller, really. A lot of people say ‘a truth teller,’ and, if the writing supports it, that’s what your aim is: to try and present people with a series of truths, and then they can make up their mind about those and whether they have any real credence or weight.
Sometimes you have to go places with characters and emotions within yourself you don’t want to do, but you have a duty to the story and as a storyteller to do it.
When you’re a storyteller, part of the process of storytelling is the kind of communion you form with the audience to whom you’re telling your story. If some segment of the audience doesn’t like that story, it doesn’t feel good.
A storyteller is basically what actors and writers are.
I just want to be a good storyteller.
In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
I consider myself a better storyteller than a Dungeon Master.
I don’t believe that my first name is Leo or that my last name is Tolstoy. I’m a storyteller.
The son has always felt like he was a footnote in one of the stories the father tells. The father is an amazing storyteller and one of the tales that he tells is how he met his wife.
I’m just an old storyteller, and I always wanted to know, what the hell were these candidates really like?
Being a talented artist is good, it’s nice, but it’s not the most important thing. I think being a good storyteller, having a good idea, a good gag, is probably more important than being a great artist.
As a storyteller, dates and time equal context.
Jackie Chan is the best storyteller on this planet.
My grandmother was an unparalleled storyteller who gave me a preview of how life might turn out, and also fortified my empathy.
Growing up with three brothers and three sisters, I was the storyteller of the family… what my mother called ‘The Liar.’
