George Stephanopoulos Quotes

The magic happens when you take facts and figures, features and benefits, decks and PowerPoints - relatively soulless information - and embed them in the telling of a purposeful story. Your 'tell' renders an experience to your audience, making the information inside the story memorable, resonant and actionable.

Neurologists say that our brains are programmed much more for stories than for abstract ideas. Tales with a little drama are remembered far longer than any slide crammed with analytics.

In writing, I search for believability, simplicity and emotional impact.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

Stories change people while statistics give them something to argue about.

You want people to feel something when you tell a story, whether they feel happy or whether they feel sad.

The issue is: how do you engage the audience? And one of the things I talk to our communicators about is: The outline is great; the stories are great. But how do you engage them? How do you make it feel like we are on a journey, not you are just up there giving me information.

One of your jobs as a speechwriter is to transform the bureaucratic into the poetic.

People's talk and the stories they tell have been engraved on my heart, and some of them have flown into my pen.

Stories are more than compelling facts. People remember stories more than they remember statistics.

A witty illustration or an apt story will accomplish more than columns of argument.

Data loses to story. Every time. Your statistics don’t trump my experience.

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.

It seemed that I could tell the whole story pretty powerfully in those 18 months between October of '62 and the spring of '64 when they were all at their peak. And yet you could see some of the shadows of Detroit's demise coming.

Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.

All the stories have to do with emotion. Emotion is driving everything.

Maybe more than a teller, I am a story listener. I really enjoy listening to stories. I remember them and keep them in my mind. All of my films are a collection of small stories that have been told to me.

You can tell how good a filmmaker is if you can turn the sound down but you can still feel the story.

There is no greater power on this earth than story.

Always remember: In the end, the surviver gets to tell the story.

Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.

I love storytelling. I love stories, and I love the way in which we connect through stories.