Dale Carnegie Quotes

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.

Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an 'Airedale,' not just a 'dog.' A taste should not be merely 'good' but 'creamy and sweet' or 'sharply salty' or 'buttery on the tongue.'

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.

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

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

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.

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.

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.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

I try to make songs visual and tactile to kind of put you into the action.

I think the atmosphere of a Prom concert can change your life, in the best way. It's so deep, the feeling you have there. The audience is so close, and there are so many of them, that you feel they are almost embracing you.

A story is much more effective than a statistic.

The silent movie is an emotional cinema: it's sensory; the fact that you don't go through a text brings you back to a basic way of telling a story predicated on the feelings you have created.

The best way to make a show that's going to resonate is to make a show that you'd love.

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

Never try to convey your idea to the audience - it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

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

There's so many great wrestlers in this sport who could probably work circles around me and it's amazing to see that, but I love being the kind of character who can take you on a roller coaster, make you smile and laugh.

At heart, we believe that the films that work well are the films that do touch people emotionally.

My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that's humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.

When I would be on the stage singing, I would see a movie of something that happened, I would be telling the story. I would be describing the story in sound, but my goal would be to make somebody else run their own movie.