Moral Storytelling Quotes

Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories and they will figure out how those stories apply to them.

Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.

I never try to sit down with a moral because kids smell that and run.

I don't believe that narrative works when it's trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth.

In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.

The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts and combine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything like anybody else; but the end in view is generally the same, and the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.

any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.

When thou dost tell another's jest, therein Omit the oaths, which true wit cannot need; Pick out of tales the mirth, but not the sin.

I've always tried to be aware of what I say in my films, because all of us who make motion pictures are teachers - teachers with very loud voices.

I call that [Book of Job], apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen.

If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.

Ideally, anything one writes should have a social conscience: if you can write a story that thrills, and with a good message, that's the perfect type of a story.

All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.

Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That's probably not a very postmodern thing to say.