Effective Storytelling Quotes

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

You don't get to hand footnotes to the audience or explain what you were trying to do and what it's supposed to be. Everything has to be on the screen, and it has to be clear.

I had a student once come up to me and we were talking about this incident, and, of course, I never had the right thing to say. But later on, I realized I should have said: Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

I wonder what my speech would be.

There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.

'The Big Sleep' would have been a more effective study of nightmarish existence had the detective been more complicated and had more curiosity been shown about his sweetheart's relation to the crime.

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!

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

Movies can be effective in influencing people to think in ways they might not otherwise be exposed to. Social commentary in films is most effective when you're not aware of a soapbox. Making the point without force-feeding the audience is the most desirable approach.

People are interested if you tell stories well and relevantly.

The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends.

Poesy and oratory omit things not essential, and insert little beautiful digressions, in order to place everything in the most effective light.

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Like anything important, anything you need people to hear - you've got to have music for it. You've got to make it at least a little piece of a song or sometimes a whole song.

I don't think a film that has no effect on people or society is a good film.

I can't recall a bad review - maybe I'm due one. But the worst thing would be if somebody said I was inaudible. Reach your audience's ears - only then can you reach their hearts.

My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination.

With American Morons, Glen Hirshberg confidently shoulders his way through the generational pack to claim his rightful place on the summit. These stories are smart, challenging, ripe with feeling, expansive in every way: Horror as it should be writ, and as only the best and most expressive can write it.

The environment is rarely put on tape, or if it is, it's so abstract that most people never realize it. They just don't know what it means. But if you can show it to them, then that's what becomes the main instrument.