Story Retelling Quotes

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

Shall I ever be able to read that story again; the one I couldn't remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do,do,do." "Indeed,yes, I will tell it to you for years and years. But now, come. We must meet the master of this house.

I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.

I'm telling a Richard Pryor story through me.

As society evolves, people are interested in a new take on an old beloved story.

The thing with 'Peter Pan' is it's been done so well so many times.

But, you know there's a lot of westerns - not that they were bad - it's just that they can be remade because they're great stories that aren't indelible in an audience's mind when it comes to both the cast and the story.

It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.

One of the things I try to do is try to make repetitions, rhymes, and mirrorings across the subject matter of my own books so that the chapter titles and the epigraphs and pictures all kind of form a tapestry. In this book, I retell fifteen of the stories. You have the critical frame, and then you have these rosettes like the motif in a carpet.

That's what ever great writer, I believe, has done over the course of time - is they've figured out new ways of telling the same stories.

The story being told in Star Wars is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

I love the challenge of taking established, iconic comics characters and showing readers why they remain contemporary.

Every filmmaker knows that when you make a book into a movie, the first thing you have to do is kill the book, unfortunately. You've got to recreate it.

I just love storytelling. I write music to tell stories. So when I'm done writing a song, I take it and go, 'Okay. How can I interpret these lyrics differently?' I love taking lyrics that were so close to me at a certain point in my life and then revamping them. I always want to take things to the next level.

You know, I grew up on romantic comedies, and it's hard to find a new way to tell that story.

When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book. It's important to see the film as a film.

There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff that we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

The one thing that I always try and take with me, if there's, like, a remake, or you're doing something again, is that every generation has a new story to tell.

I was hesitant to do 'Mulan II.' For me, I felt like the story that needed to be told, this legendary character of Mulan, was already encompassed in the first movie, and I was worried they would try to create this crazy cartoon character out of this legendary character of China.

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn't learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God's injunction and Adam's loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. Hurry, they say, he'll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.

There's no environment. Use your imagination. There's no fourth wall, whether it's the first time you've told this story about her life, or the sixth time.

As an artist, you're thankful to get a shot at a story more than once, because it doesn't happen all the time. Whether you talk about 'Hamlet' or 'Death of a Salesman,' you always want to see what the next group of actors will do.