Brad Anderson Quotes

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

It's astonishing how many people who direct action don't know how to tell a story.

You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.

Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself.

I've always said I have one skill. That skill - if I have it at all - is storytelling.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

Certain people can keep a word tune, so to speak, and certain people cannot. And, above all, certain people can tell a story, and other people can't. They don't hear that point where something else has to come.

Everybody's got one killer story. It doesn't take talent to tell that story, it just takes experience.

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

Managing to tell a story is very gratifying.

Most people don't know how to tell stories.

Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers.

I certainly knew from an early age... how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people's heads.

I know little stories that happen to people around me, and I can repeat that in a way that has some color.

A great story poorly told doesn't do anybody any good at all, and nobody wants to hear it, and nobody wants to read it. The craft of it is really more important than the subject matter.

I don't believe in inspiration at all. We live in a world that demands explanation. And fiction has the capability to offer explanations for things.

Stories in themselves are not automatically good; it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

My gift seems to be that I am able to tell a story in a comprehensible and engaging way.

Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure.

There is always a reason why, and I need to tell the stories.

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

I think the impulse to get to the heart of the story and to tell it well is in my genes.

My name is Bruce Feiler, and I'm an explainaholic. I first heard this word used to describe Isaac Asimov, and I knew instantly that I suffered from the same condition. It's the incurable desire to tell, shape, share, occasionally exaggerate, often elongate, and inevitably bungle a good story.