Andy Stanley Quotes

I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can.

If you want to convey a message, you must do so in an enjoyable format.

You want, whenever you're telling a story, to have a certain amount of range, and you want to be able to take the audience on that ride with you.

It's important to tell meaningful stories and to find new ways to communicate those stories to people.

Storytelling is about listening in any media.

I tell stories. Because I believe you can do things that joke tellers can't do, and that is, bring your audience along.

When you're a storyteller, part of the process of storytelling is the kind of communion you form with the audience to whom you're telling your story. If some segment of the audience doesn't like that story, it doesn't feel good.

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

You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'

The experience you're going to take the audience on is as important as the story you're trying to tell. And that experience needs to excite me so much that I am desperate to share it.

I never want to tell a story where I'm lecturing to the audience.

We could make the most beautiful film in the world, but if it doesn't have a heart beating underneath it, then no one's going to be interested.

Every film is a journey.

Whatever films I make, the mandate is that it should touch the audiences and engage them from the first scene.

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

Fans want to see a story with characters, and they want to see a story.

Ten years ago, you wrote a book and you never expected to find out anything about the author. Now with social media, everyone wants that connection. I think our readers want to be invited into our lives and brought on the journey and be part of this whole process.

I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all - make us laugh, think, cry and cheer - preferably in that order.

Communicators need to figure out how well do they engage people, and they should not talk one word longer than people are engaged.

If our message reaches the kitchen tables, we are in good shape.

Audiences are very willing to be taken somewhere, and to ask an audience beforehand what it wants is probably, I think, a mistake. Much better you should tell them what you want and hope they agree with it.

I want people to laugh and cry, not just sit and stare at the TV.

With anything, and especially with the pallet of viewers in watching anything on TV and film, you have to entertain them.

I think if you can get people to laugh, you can get people to listen.