139 Inspiring Storytelling Quotes

In a world where stories shape our understanding and perspectives, the art of storytelling remains an invaluable skill. Whether through the pages of a novel, the lens of a camera, or the vibrant hues on a canvas, stories have the remarkable ability to inspire, transform, and unite us. This collection of 139 inspiring storytelling quotes captures the essence of this timeless craft. These quotes offer wisdom and insight from celebrated authors, directors, artists, and thinkers, inviting you to delve into the power of narrative. Let these words ignite your imagination and encourage you to weave your own tales, connecting hearts and minds across generations. Dive in and let the journey begin, as you explore the profound impact story can have on the human experience.

1. “A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.” - Norton Juster

2. “I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.” - Leslie Marmon Silko

3. “My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.” - Diane Setterfield

4. “Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...” - Joseph Conrad

5. “It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...” - Eudora Welty

6. “But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.” - Diane Setterfield

7. “Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in allplaces, in all times. ” - Rives Collins

8. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” - Philip Pullman

9. “There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.” - Stephen King

10. “To hell with facts! We need stories!” - Ken Kesey

11. “Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.” - Umberto Eco

12. “Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.” - Michael Shermer

13. “Every great love starts with a great story...” - Nicholas Sparks

14. “Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming. ” - William Goldman

15. “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.” - Flannery O'Connor

16. “There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.— Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuarón” - Mitch Glazer

17. “Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.” - Arthur C. Clarke

18. “Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.” - Eudora Welty

19. “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” - Doris May Lessing

20. “It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.” - C.S. Lewis

21. “The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...” - Stephen King

22. “Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.” - Jennifer Weiner

23. “How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?"If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?"Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story...” - Stephen King

24. “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.” - Sue Monk Kidd

25. “Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.” - Carolyn Heilbrun

26. “The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.” - Vera Nazarian

27. “I'll tell you a secret.Old storytellers never die.They disappear into their own story.” - Vera Nazarian

28. “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” - Brandon Sanderson

29. “Every story needs to be worth telling.” - Vera Nazarian

30. “Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept.” - Enrique de Hériz

31. “The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.” - Stephen King

32. “Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.” - Peter Straub

33. “Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts. It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forbearance, the nobility, the romance, the idealism, that -- being what it is -- it falls so short of in fact and in deed.” - Clare Boothe Luce

34. “The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside.But on the inside there is nothing—only the bare gingerbread walls.It is not a real house—not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room.That’s when the stories can move in.They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite.” - Vera Nazarian

35. “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.” - Jean Baudrillard

36. “I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. ” - Chris Cleave

37. “Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.” - Alan Moore

38. “When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.” - Mary Higgins Clark

39. “A story is never complete.” - Jude Brigley

40. “If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.” - John Berger

41. “...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.” - Rabih Alameddine

42. “...required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way.” - Ted Conover

43. “When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.” - Frank Delaney

44. “This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.” - Jandy Nelson

45. “Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.” - Siri Hustvedt

46. “The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.” - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

47. “The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it -- and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics.” - Beryl Markham

48. “The drinking dens are spilling outThere's staggering in the squareThere's lads and lasses falling aboutAnd a crackling in the airDown around the dungeon doorsThe shelters and the queuesEverybody's looking forSomebody's arms to fall intoAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowThere's frost on the graves and the monumentsBut the taverns are warm in townPeople curse the governmentAnd shovel hot food downThe lights are out in the city hallThe castle and the keepThe moon shines down upon it allThe legless and asleepAnd it's cold on the tollgateWith the wagons creeping throughCold on the tollgateGod knows what I could do with youAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowThe garrison sleeps in the citadelWith the ghosts and the ancient stonesHigh up on the parapetA Scottish piper stands aloneAnd high on the windThe highland drums begin to rollAnd something from the past just comesAnd stares into my soulAnd it's cold on the tollgateWith the Caledonian BluesCold on the tollgateGod knows what I could do with youAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowWhat it isIt's what it is nowThere's a chink of light, there's a burning wickThere's a lantern in the towerWee Willie Winkie with a candlestickStill writing songs in the wee wee hoursOn Charlotte Street I takeA walking stick from my hotelThe ghost of Dirty DickIs still in search of Little NellAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowOh what it isWhat it is now” - Mark Knopfler

49. “Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called.” - Nancy Mellon

50. “I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.” - Edgar Rice Burroughs

51. “People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.” - Neil Gaiman

52. “Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.” - Charles de Lint

53. “You know what a storyteller is, don't you? It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't.” - Sandra Dallas

54. “Whatever story you're telling, it will be more interesting if, at the end you add, "and then everything burst into flames.” - Brian P. Cleary

55. “Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.” - Jennifer McMahon

56. “I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one's life. Wherever I've traveled--Kenya, Chile, Australia, Japan--I've found the most dependable way to preserve these possibilities is to be reminded of them in stories. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns,we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.” - Barry Lopez

57. “You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.” - Charles Yu

58. “It is the nature of stories to leave out far more than they include.” - Marion Dane Bauer

59. “Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman. After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof. "A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. ("The Pool")” - Daphne du Maurier

60. “Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.” - John Green

61. “To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.” - Umberto Eco

62. “Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.” - Jean-Luc Godard

63. “Which story do you want to hear my child?"he picked him up and made him sit on his lap."Tell us the story of that fairy who lived in a house of wafers,had a garden of chocolate trees and a pond full of goldfishes,"the child wrapped his arms around his shoulder.” - Chitralekha Paul

64. “All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth -- yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes it nearly impossible to handle. It is such a great responsibility that it's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world.” - Vera Nazarian

65. “The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well.” - Criss Jami

66. “Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.” - Criss Jami

67. “The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.” - Vera Nazarian

68. “Yet surely that story she had imagined was a real thing? If you created a story with your mind surely it was just as much there as a piece of needlework that you created with your fingers? You could not see it with your bodily eyes, that was all....the invisible world must be saturated with the stories that men tell both in their minds and by their lives. They must be everywhere, these stories, twisting together, penetrating existence like air breathed into the lungs, and how terrible, how awful, thought Henrietta, if the air breathed should be foul. How dare men live, how dare they think or imagine, when every action and every thought is a tiny thread to ar or enrich that tremendous tapestried story that man weaves on the loom that God has set up, a loom that stretches from heaven above to hell below, and from side to side of the universe...” - Elizabeth Goudge

69. “it was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380” - Abraham Verghese

70. “A lesson in bringing about true changes of mind and heart comes from a Japanese functionary. By day, he crunched numbers that showed his country was approaching imminent energy crisis and helped to craft policy. By night, he weaved a novel in which a bureaucrat-hero helps see the country through to new energy sources. When the crisis came faster than he expected, he actually put the novel away because he did not want to make the burden of his countrymen worse. When the short-term crisis passed, he published his novel. It's phenomenal and well-timed success fueled the vision that inspired difficult change and maintained a sense of urgency.” - Daniel Yergin

71. “Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher..” - Patti Davis

72. “I am a storyteller. The type that went from place to place, gathered people in the square and transported them, inspired them, woke them up, shook their insides around so that they could resettle in a new pattern, a new way of being. It is a tradition that believes that the story speaks to the soul, not the ego... to the heart, not the head. In todays world , we yearn so to 'understand', to conquer with our mind, but it is not in the mind that a mythic story dwells.So I do not offer interpretation. What I offer is to tell the story again, and again... on and on, if need be - until the ego has stepped aside and the soul can hear. I trust that the life of the story continues long after I have gone, if the listener can step aside and be taken up and in, to a world where words speak not to the mind, but to the soul.I invite you to trust it too.” - Donna Jacobs Sife

73. “We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.” - Roger C. Shank, from Tell Me A Story

74. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” - Lisa See

75. “I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.” - Donald Miller

76. “Stories. Character. Dialouge. Entire worlds created on the page. Worlds that could sweep you away or frighten you, make you laugh or cry. Worlds that allowed you to escape to another country or time. Worlds built piece by piece of ink and punctuation.” - Jamie Michaels

77. “And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.” - George R. R. Martin

78. “My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.” - Tahir Shah

79. “Stories are not like the real world; they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside.” - Tahir Shah

80. “My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.” - Tahir Shah

81. “Stories are a communal currency of humanity.” - Tahir Shah

82. “When I get tired of new clunky writing, I resort to old fashioned story tellers, like Wilkie Collins.” - Sonia Rumzi

83. “Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.” - Gregory Maguire

84. “The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.” - Kenneth Grahame

85. “Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us.” - Richard Denney

86. “That is the power of a good story. It can encourage you, it can make you laugh, it can bring you joy. It will make you think, it will tap innto your hidden emotions, and it can make you cry. The power of a story can also bring about healing, give you peace, and change your life!" (p.15)” - Jeff Dixon

87. “No book can be written till it wants to be written, till it shouts to be written, and raises up a persistent din in the writer's head. And then, if you want peace, you just have to pull it out and freeze it in print. Nothing less would do.” - Jyoti Arora

88. “Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent.Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.” - Jeanette Winterson

89. “What if things happened to you—special, magic things—because you’d been preparing for them?” - Jennifer McMahon

90. “We come together as a community — in our sitting room, in sacred space or in a coffee shop. We share our joy and pain, our surprises and disappointments, successes and failures and we try to make some sense of it all. We listen to find some way to connect. We give reassurance or advice. Sometimes we say nothing because just being there is enough. Storytelling is that moment in time when we are not alone - I met my Soul in a Coffee Shop” - Louise Gilbert

91. “The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can’t. Can they make it so we don’t like sweet anymore? No, no they can’t.” - Chris Dee

92. “Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.” - Catherynne M. Valente

93. “Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . .. . . (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings” - J.R.R. Tolkien

94. “You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.” - Erin Morgenstern

95. “The Dreamer awakesThe shadow goes byThe tale I have told you,That tale is a lie.But listen to me,Bright maiden, proud youthThe tale is a lie;What it tells is the truth.” - Traditional folktale ending

96. “Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.” - Jo Deurbrouck

97. “Statements make sense for somebody who needs advice. I’m not giving advice. I don’t instruct. At my best, I delight. That’s my job.” - Ron Koertge

98. “During an especially noisy elementary school assembly I witnessed a common marvel.  Someone spoke,"Once upon a time..." into the mic, and the room hushed.  Such magic never ceases to amaze me.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

99. “As I quietly stare off into space, eyes glazed over and brow thoughtfully taut, know that I am going about my business.  I am a storyteller.  Daydreaming is the best part of my job.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

100. “What I'm going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it's an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a certain degree. It's a gloss, a rendition, so it's not exact. But it'll do. -Silenus” - Robert Jackson Bennett

101. “The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.” - Annette Simmons

102. “There were good places and bad places to tell stories and there were of course stories that could not be told in any place on earth and these were reserved for heaven. ” - Gerald Hausman

103. “Mythology can be defined as the sacred history of humankind. This is different from what we call "history." Mythical stories, when you trace them back to their origin, often have a sacredness, a holy quality that comes from the bedrock of lore from which they emerged.” - Gerald Hausman

104. “Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.” - Amy Bloom

105. “In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died'—if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.” - Amy Bloom

106. “When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end.” - James Robertson

107. “Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.” - James Robertson

108. “Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.” - Robert McKee

109. “Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.” - Robert McKee

110. “When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.” - Robert McKee

111. “To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.” - Ben Marcus

112. “Art is a captured emotion. When I say this I mean all artists, whether you are a photographer, a writer, or sculptor, you are trying to capture the way someone or something made you feel. As a story teller I am trying to captivate the audience and allow them to feel just a small portion of the emotion I am desperately trying to preserve.” - Tommy Tran

113. “Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' — 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not the old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old — it is the new combinations that make them new.” - Salman Rushdie

114. “Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo.” - Harlan Ellison

115. “In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.” - Patrick Somerville

116. “The ability to see our lives as stories and share those stories with others is at the core of what it means to be human. We use stories to order and make sense of our lives, to define who we are, even to construct our realities: this happened, then this happened, then this. I was, I am, I will be. We recount our dreams, narrate our days and organize our memories into stories we tell others and ourselves. As natural-born storytellers, we respond to others’ stories because they are deeply, intimately familiar.” - John Capecci and Timothy Cage

117. “The enormity of problems like hunger and social injustice can certainly motivate us to act. We can be convinced logically of the need for intervention and change. But it is the story of one individual that ultimately makes the difference—by offeringliving proof.” - John Capecci and Timothy Cage

118. “When you’re telling a story, you’re trying to connect to people in a particular way … The way in which you guys have inhabited this world, this universe, has made you part of it, part of the story. You are living in Firefly. When I see you guys, I don’t think the show is off the air. I don’t think there’s a show; I think that’s what the world is like. … The story is our lives.” - Joss Whedon

119. “Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.” - Andrea A. Lunsford

120. “Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go places and travel through time.” - A.A. Patawaran

121. “The pleasures of being a novelist are many.  But the greatest by far is the manner in which I live through my characters; experiencing every detail of their story as it unfolds gradually and personally within my own creative psyche.  I'm like a cat with untold lives, because each new book is my rebirth.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

122. “You bound him to you with your courage and your tales. You hold him to you now. You captured a wild creature when you had no place you could keep him.” - Juliet Marillier

123. “Truly, there is magic in fairy tales.For it takes but a simply-uttered 'Once upon a time...' to allure and spellbind an audience.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

124. “Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation.” - Erica Lorraine Scheidt

125. “I do believe that some humans have more amazing lives than others–above all, those who don’t sit down in a chair like mere spectators letting their lives happen in front of them, but they take risks as heroes do, experiencing, living, becoming the main character—but no matter what, we all have at least one story to tell.” - Merce Cardus

126. “But as she continued and finished her tale, I could tell that her heart was elsewhere, and when she excused herself to go to bed, she left without saying good night. After that, the princesses in her stories were always beautiful. Always.” - Kelly Barnhill

127. “Whether this tale be true or false, none can tell, for none were there to witness it themselves.” - Marjane Satrapi

128. “I think that's the way people absorb television. All the explanations in Doctor Who are there if that's your bag, but they're not essential to your enjoyment of it. An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand — it's about making people care.” - Steven Moffat

129. “When I got home, I seemed in a dream. My windows looked upon hers; I remained all the day looking at them, and all the day they were closed and dark. I forgot everything for this woman; I slept not, I eat nothing. That evening I fell into a fever, the next morning I was delirious, and the next evening I was DEAD!' 'Dead!' cried his hearers. 'Dead!' answered the narrator, with a conviction in his voice which words alone cannot give; 'dead as Fabian, the cast of whose dead face hangs from that wall!' 'Go on,' whispered the others, holding their breath. The hail still rattled against the windows, and the fire had so nearly died out, that they threw more wood on the feeble flame which penetrated the darkness of the studio and cast a faint light upon the pale face of him who told the story. ("The Dead Man's Story” - Hain Friswell

130. “I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.” - G.K. Chesterton

131. “So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)” - Nalo Hopkinson

132. “Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.” - Francis M. Nevins

133. “You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.” - C.S. Lewis

134. “This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.” - Walter Benjamin

135. “Storytelling comes naturally to humans, but since we live in an unnatural world, we sometimes need a little help doing what we'd naturally do.” - Dan Harmon

136. “In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.” - Jules Verne

137. “And it's just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there's no overlap.” - Jandy Nelson

138. “Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone.” - Stephenie Meyer

139. “It is a law of the story-teller's art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.” - Melville Davisson Post