Stephen Greenblatt Quotes

I'm a storyteller. If I have that on my precis when I go, 'Storyteller,' I'm satisfied with that.

what storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.

The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.

Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling.

The key is to work with people who are passionate about storytelling and who have a similar sensibility of the type and nature of the stories that you want to tell.

How many times can you put together 26 different stories without running out?

You may not know it now, if you studied communications or engineering, law or medicine, business or classics: you're a storyteller, too.

I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.

I think that when I'm telling a story, I'm doing the best I can to tell the story as fully as I can, and if there are various fractures that happen in the story, then that's just the very thing that the story is as opposed to my looking for avenues of difference in one story. They just really do exist. For me, anyway.

People are interested if you tell stories well and relevantly.

I make no distinction between writing and storytelling; I've always wanted to tell stories.

Good stories flow like honey but bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot be absorbed in the first time of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered.

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

To me, a good storyteller should be able to tell stories across genres.

If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.

Creating is one thing; telling the story is one thing. I see myself more as a storyteller than a story creator.

I do love storytelling.

The thing about Drew Goddard and Mike Schur is that they are legit geniuses, and they love storytelling. They love creating worlds, love messing with the audience; they love doing things that we don't expect. To get to be a part of that is too good to be true.

Every story is organic, and every story finds its own ending.

Stories are really important to people and can really change the way they understand, and even live, their lives. As such, I don't agree much with people who say, 'Calm down, it's just a story.'

It's one thing to narrate a story and another thing to execute it.

After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.

Good stories are constructed, not found.

It's all still about having a good story. You have to have a good story as your anchor, as your main focus. So for me, personally, I just like to concentrate on writing the best book I can, and if there's other stuff that goes along with it, that's awesome, as long as the story is central.

But if we have people who have the power to tell a story, there will always be readers.