John P. Kotter Quotes

A story is much more effective than a statistic.

The magic happens when you take facts and figures, features and benefits, decks and PowerPoints - relatively soulless information - and embed them in the telling of a purposeful story. Your 'tell' renders an experience to your audience, making the information inside the story memorable, resonant and actionable.

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.

Stories are more than compelling facts. People remember stories more than they remember statistics.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.

Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.

You want people to feel something when you tell a story, whether they feel happy or whether they feel sad.

Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life.

A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.

We try to be driven by what's a good story, what's truthful, and the drama of what happens next.

With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.

Under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom or a boardroom or even the war room. On the contrary, doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high.

I try to use all of my senses when describing a setting, and try to think of everything that would impact a character in any given scene.

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

I prefer drama; I think character-driven drama is my favorite kind of stuff to go watch, and I like being challenged by that kind of stuff in that way.

Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.

I'm drawn to a good story, really, as I hope most people are. For me, it's the story that's going to stay with you eventually, not necessarily the genre. I go to watch a film because of the story, not because it was a Western or a comedy.

I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

My mind sort of works like a search engine. You ask me something, and I start seeing pictures.

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

A good story often increases the salability of an item without increasing its actual value.