Bill Callahan Quotes

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

I like when you are telling a story and fall into an impression.

If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

Stories are like that. Like cities, they are built on the stones and bones of the past.

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.

I'm actually quite critical of the storytelling theme. I think all the storytellers are not storytellers.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you - they see where you're going.

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

The idea of having a narrative guiding the viewer through and grasping their attention is a really compelling thing.

Everyone's always telling themselves stories about their lives, writers or not.

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.

In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.

There is very much a sense of different versions of storytelling within our 'Camelot' - who tells those stories, who creates them, who shifts them.

The more stories I told, the more I found I wanted to tell. There was always something left unsaid. I got hooked by my own impulse of 'Well, what's gonna happen next?'

What I've always been most interested in is exposing the way stories and fantasies reconstitute our everyday reality. What appears to be non-fiction is not only totally mysterious, unfathomable, and strange when you really look at what it is.

I think you can tilt too far to the side of the story where the message is just simply entertainment. So I think your goal has to be to craft in one sentence what the truth is you are trying to convey. And then you find or create a story that you wrap around that truth.

What you cut out becomes part of the story you tell.

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.

I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and just as well predicated, but the big difference between me and you is that I'm honest and you're dishonest. I know I'm telling you lies.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.