Brandon Stanton Quotes

So what I am always looking for is, I'm always looking for something that that person has told me that nobody else has told me. It is normally not an opinion, and it is normally not a philosophy. It's almost always a story. Because we all share similar philosophies, we all share similar opinions on a lot of different issues, but all of our stories are our own.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

There are no really new stories anymore.

I've never been interested in diarising my life through song. So much stuff has been done before. So many people have brilliantly articulated the pain of heartbreak or the joy of love or whatever. Those elements exist in our music, but I guess I strive to write about unconventional things instead.

Sometimes people get fairly obscure just for the creative license of it, and that can backfire. Iconic stories are iconic for a reason, and there are so many incredible, iconic history stories that have not been told that we don't need to go too deep in the well yet.

What I find really exciting is stories from a different viewpoint.

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.

I'm not the go-to guy. Everybody is trying to tell their story and have different ways of telling it.

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.

It is an author's primary duty to entertain. Sling out all the philosophical terms, but keep the reader turning the page.

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.

Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.

I can do my part of the storytelling. I can carry it. I can paint it. I can maneuver it. I can massage it. But if I don't have anything to work with, then there's nothing.

Quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.

It's nice to dig deeper into people who may look one way but always have a story to tell. I obviously write about that a lot.

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

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

What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.

The most important thing to realize is that everyone is capable of telling a story.

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

Every line is the actual experience with its own unique story.

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

All the truth in the world is held in stories.