David Grann Quotes

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

I like to say, 'You get as much story as you can take.' But you have to effectively render it.

We're storytellers - and if the story is told well, you go with the form.

My number one goal has always been to try to tell interesting, cohesive, long-term stories.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

I'm a good storyteller.

In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

Touching on universality is an important part of effective storytelling, but the problem with cliches is that they are tired and dull. And that's where writers must try to be artful.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic.

I'm interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.

The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

Audiences still crave storytelling.

I realized that I've always been a storyteller.

For me, my brand is good storytelling.

Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.

I just respond to the stories I'm being asked to tell.

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

The story, not the money, excites me.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.

I think storytelling is a thing of beauty, and also very difficult. It's a craft you have to continue to work at.