78 Inspirational Storytelling Quotes

In a world where stories shape our understanding and connect us on a deeper level, the art of storytelling has never been more powerful. Whether you're a writer, speaker, or simply someone who loves to share experiences, the right words can inspire, motivate, and transform. That's why we've gathered the top 78 inspirational storytelling quotes to ignite your creativity and elevate your narrative skills. These quotes, from some of the greatest storytellers and thinkers, will not only fuel your passion for storytelling but also remind you of the profound impact your stories can have on others. Prepare to be inspired and empowered as you dive into this curated collection designed to celebrate and enhance the timeless craft of storytelling.

1. “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” - Willa Cather

2. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” - Nora Roberts

3. “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

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

5. “A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.” - John Steinbeck

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

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

8. “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

9. “A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood.” - Marcus Sedgwick

10. “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

11. “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

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

13. “Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.” - colum mccann

14. “No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.” - Lewis Carroll

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.” - Donald Miller

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

20. “Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.” - Ernest Hemingway

21. “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

22. “If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?” - Lloyd Alexander

23. “These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.” - Edwidge Danticat

24. “A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And 'making sense' must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.” - David Abram

25. “The boy thought, How powerful a story is, and how by a kind of magic it compels the imagination; there was nothing in the world, it seemed to him, so mysteriously strong; and he began to wonder if he would ever have anything as beautiful to tell.” - Glenway Wescott

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

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

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

31. “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

32. “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

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

34. “The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, "This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay," you're sunk. If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them."(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)” - P.G. Wodehouse

35. “A well-spun tale can transport listeners away from their humdrum lives and return them with an enlarged sense of the world.” - Jonathan Auxier

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

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

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

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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Storytellers seldom let facts get in the way of perpetuating a legend, although a few facts add seasoning and make the legend more believable.” - John Alexander

45. “One doesn't intentionally to alter the truth, just enhance it and make it more memorable.” - John Alexander

46. “A tale spinner's goal is entertainment.” - John Alexander

47. “I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she'd done penance for stories - stories that I'll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She'd wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from my dreams I hadn't had as yet, and so I didn't quite understand what she was after."It's about feeling," Camille had insisted.I didn't understand then that she was talking about risk.” - Stuart Dybek

48. “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

49. “The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.” - Marina Warner

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

51. “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

52. “Maybe if people can't have an end to their suffering, the next thing they seek for is to know why they suffer. Suffering is a part of life in this world, part of a cycle....Stories give you a way to see things. A way to understand the events of your life. Even if you don't realize it while you're hearing the tale.” - Matthew J. Kirby

53. “A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” - George Lucas

54. “Da dove devo cominciare? Intanto, va chiarita subito una cosa fondamentale: un romanziere non scrive mai tutto quello che sa sui suoi personaggi. I lettori non devono venire a sapere tutto. Alcuni aspetti è meglio che restino un segreto fra lo scrittore e le sue creature.” - Cornelia Funke

55. “There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. ” - Gerald Hausman

56. “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

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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “The more stories I study, the more I begin to suspect that there is only one story, and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it.” - J. Aleksandr Wootton

63. “That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.” - Eugene H. Peterson

64. “The heart is a repository of emotions--real, imagined, and invented, owned and borrowed, past, present, future--and there in your chest, operating at an average of 80 beats per minute at rest, is a heart that has stories to tell.” - A.A. Patawaran

65. “Write in pictures. With your words, let the reader see not letters, but images. Be specific about every detail, but don't describe it--make it happen on the page, if you were writing fiction, or make it happen over again, if you were writing about history or some recent event.” - A.A. Patawaran

66. “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

67. “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

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

69. “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

70. “...when an old person dies, a whole library disappears.” - Simone Schwarz-Bart

71. “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

72. “Storytelling? God started that. Discovery. Lust. Murder. Revenge. Power. Sin. Redemption. Forgiveness. Miracles. We simply retell the stories in the language of our generation.” - Dennis R. Miller

73. “Though a story may begin as a lie, perhaps it can be made true. Perhaps their ultimate power is found in how they inspire us to action.” - Matthew J. Kirby

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.” - Haruki Murakami

78. “Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the freedom the author claims for herself must be shared with the reader. So that would mean that literature is stories that put themselves at the disposal of readers who want to heal themselves. Their healing power lies in their honesty, the freshness of their vision, the new and unexpected things they show, the increase in power and responsibility they give the reader.” - Geoff Ryman