Top 600 Telling Quotes

I love storytellers. When I was growing up, my inspirations were watching Eddie Murphy, Dennis Wolfberg, and Louie Anderson. These guys were great at telling stories, and I made that my own style, talking about things that happened to me and trying to make them funny.

Anytime you’re telling a story about monsterhood, you’re playing around with ideas about otherness and alienation.

I exaggerate when I’m angry, but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.

P.C. is just too Big Brother – telling me how I should act and feel.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.

For most people, creativity is a serious business. They forget the telling phrase ‘the play of ideas’ and think that they need to knuckle down and work more. Often, the reverse is true. They need to play.

Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story.

Rove and his attorneys can parse the words all they want, but it is now clear that while Rove may not have given a reporter Plame’s name, he clearly identified her by telling the reporter that Joseph Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent.

When you in the studio you don’t need everybody calling your phone telling you about what’s going on outside the studio. I don’t need those distractions.

I know the crew so well, so I forget I’m being filmed. It’s like cooking with a friend in the kitchen – you’re talking, as you do, and maybe you’re telling her about this wonderful way to prepare lamb chops – it’s more natural, more honest.

Let’s stop telling people from modest backgrounds that their education is capped at a certain level because of where they grew up. In fact I can attest to the fact that all this attitude does is put people off wanting to test the waters and apply, or push themselves towards higher education at all.

I’m not at my house storyboarding, and telling them they need to move from A to B, ‘Move here and then there.’ Never, ever! I used to storyboard when I was much less experienced.

Since I was , I’ve had that feeling of, ‘Am I enough? Am I worthy? Am I supposed to be here?’ And my culture and society is telling me that I’m actually not in a lot of ways – unless I have this amount of money, or I’m in this kind of car and I have this kind of job, or I’m famous, or whatever.

I pefer an ugly truth to a pretty lie. If someone is telling me the truth that is when I will give my heart.

I’ve learned to set boundaries and know when to say, ‘I just need to rest.’ I’m good at listening to what my body’s telling me.

Maybe our telling of the story wasn’t as clear as it should have been, but I don’t think that’s true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.

Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’. The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.

We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.

Music gave me a sense that I was worthwhile and that I had something of value to offer the world even though everybody was telling me that I didn’t.

There’s a great tradition in storytelling that’s thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that’s really what I wanted to do.

As far back as I can remember, my mother would have me down by the bed at night with her, praying. I can still hear her voice calling my name to God and telling him that she wanted me to follow him in whatever he called me to do.

What I’ve been telling everyone that loves Carolina football is that we are going to put a team out there that, number one, is in good shape. We’re going to be fit, we are going to be able to play the whole game and we’re not going to poop out.

I wrote that song for my wife, and it’s what some guy who’s sitting under a tree would be singing to the woman of his life, telling her how wonderful she is. To me, that’s more lasting than something that sounds like it belongs on a movie soundtrack.

There’s a classic medical aphorism: ‘Listen to the patient; they’re telling you the diagnosis.’ Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.

No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.

Oprah was not somebody who was telling us what to do, she wasn’t really teaching us like so many people we see today. With Oprah, she was learning and we were learning with her. And I think that’s really was the seed that was planted for all of us to just hang in there with her.

Telling stories and having them received is so important. That dialogue is everything. I tell my students all the time that what separates us as human beings is our ability to hold stories. Our narrative history. There is so much power in that. Storytelling is our human industry.

Somebody was telling me about the French Army rifle that was being advertised on eBay the other day – the description was, ‘Never shot. Dropped once.

I got to the point where I was fed up with so many people telling me how and who I was supposed to be.

We would not accept any country telling us who to buy weapons from and who not to buy from.

Anyone, without exception, can know God if they really want to simply by praying, by honestly telling Him that they want to know Him. He always responds to honest seekers. Jesus promised, ‘All who seek, find.’

The whole experience of doing a sitcom is… Telling jokes with such precision is really exciting, but it’s also terrifying.

To be honest, being a fat girl, when people are telling you you need to eat, it’s the biggest thrill of your life.

You just have to keep the same mentality of trying to prove yourself every single day. But it’s a lot of easier when you have people telling you how bad you are than when people are telling you how good you are.

There was a whole display set up of all the X-Men paraphernalia. My wife couldn’t resist telling this 5-year-old boy that I was Wolverine. The little kid looked up at me and he was staring at me.

My boyfriend keeps telling me I’ve got to own things. So, first I bought this car. And then he told me I oughta get a house. ‘Why a house?’ ‘Well, you gotta have a place to park the car.’

Private dreams are the most powerful. You have to dream of success to make it happen, and if you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will. But that doesn’t mean you have to go around telling everyone about it.

If Harvard is $60,000 and University of Toronto, where I went to school, is maybe six. So you’re really telling me that education is 10 times better at Harvard than it is at University of Toronto? That seems ridiculous to me.

My parents broke up when I was six. Before, I was a very active, naughty child, but after my father left me, I stopped talking. I became very good at hiding my emotions. I felt so ashamed of telling others that I didn’t have a father, because that was not common in the 1960s.

I don’t remember my father reading to me, but I remember him telling me bedtime stories. I got to pick what was in them, and then he’d make them up.

Reality in movies is the reality of the story you’re telling, so it may not match the reality as we know it, but the reason there’s art is that it tries to bring some kind of understanding of all the suffering and joys and pain that we go through. Storytelling brings some value to it.

We are telling our kids that nature is in the past and it probably doesn’t count anymore, the future is in electronics, the boogeyman is in the woods, and playing outdoors is probably illicit and possibly illegal.

I think human beings have a really broad spectrum of traits, and I almost feel implicated when we say, ‘Men are like this, women are like this.’ Nobody was telling me, ‘Don’t get dirty, don’t play in the mud, girls don’t do that.’

The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it’s because you’re telling a story about racism or at least about race.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

There’s a part in a woman’s soul, God has given it to every woman, and it’s the part where you know whether he’s telling the truth or not. Women see red flags.

It’s funny, I had dinner with my dear friend John Spencer last night and I’m not in the first episode, but he’s at the beginning of it and he was telling me about it and I thought this sounds very hot because I think this is definitely the last year of West Wing.

We must not be misled by left-wing incompetent news media that, day after day, feed us a diet of fantasy telling us we are bigots, racists and hate-mongers.

George Carlin is kind of my template now because George Carlin before was straight laced regular comic and he had short hair, a tie, suit, nightclub guy. Then he said screw it, let his hair grow, just started telling what he thought was the truth. So that’s what I’m trying to do.