Danai Gurira Quotes

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.

People want real-life stories.

When you tell a story that you know is having an effect on the audience, that, for me, is the transforming thing.

What does it serve any studio to not reflect the lives of people who are giving you money, who are crying out to you, 'Hey, please tell our stories.'

We write songs that hit different people at different ages where they live.

If the human story in 'STM' is relatable, it will work.

Everything has changed and we're all living in one city now. What happens somewhere affects things everywhere, so I have to be careful and whatever stories I work on, I want them to have redeeming moral values.

We have no filter for music, but we feel it when what's being spoken and sung is telling a story and evidencing a character.

I've come to realize that people connect more when they know you're telling them the truth or some aspect of your story, some mutated version of how you are experiencing this life.

Sad stories make good books

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

I feel like people, when it comes to music, whatever genre, they relate to the story more than just the song.

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Fiction is most powerful when it contains most truth; and there is little truth we get so true as that which we find in fiction.

The thing to remember when you're writing," he said, " is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader. I don't care what literary device you might use, or belief systems you tap into--if you can make a story true for the reader, if you can give them a glimpse into another way of seeing the world, or another way that they can cope with their problems, then that story is a succes.

Whatever the drama of the story is, you have to be true to it.

Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.

For me a film is at its best when you can start filling in the story with your own life experience.

To me to be a storyteller is you got to be able to speak the truth. You've got to be able to absorb life and take in life and be able to interpret it in a way that anybody in this room could say, "Man, that's my story. I can relate to that."

I'm always interested in telling stories that have a message because I really do believe that film is so powerful.

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

I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got it out, the story was really all that mattered.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

I had self-doubt about whether my story was interesting to people. I didn't want to write something that was anecdotal. It was important to me that people would get something out of my book. I want people to read it and say, "Now I don't feel so alone," or "I'm going to remember that next time I'm being an asshole."

All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.