Story Selling Quotes

The point of acting is to pretend you're someone else and sell a story.

I believe there are two kinds of journalists. One who sells a story by being creative, and one who sells a story by being sensationalist.

A story never looks as good as when the other fellow buys it.

I sold my first story when I was 21 in 1973.

I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.

Recognize that the great majority of us aren't trained actors and entertainers. Usually, it's not our faces, our bodies, our personas or our stage presence that sells our books. It's our stories, our visions and our voices.

It was like a dream come true for me. When you write the book, it's still intimate. It might have been a best-seller but it's still my story, as I wrote it. The moment we or they make a movie, it's not my story anymore. There's a lot of letting go involved in the process.

I think of the author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, 'I will tell you a story' and then he passes the hat.

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

High-concept one-liners were huge when I got my start in the film industry.

'The Squickerwonkers' was the story I wrote when I was on 'The Hobbit.' And I brought it to Comic-Con and sold out a thousand copies I had printed.

After you've written a story, the thing to do is sell it. Sounds simple, and it is, if one will follow certain basic principles of salesmanship.

I started in 1957 when I sold my first story to a magazine.

I remember selling my first short story and thinking, Oh my god, I sold something for fifty dollars! That gives me the authority to say I'm a writer and to actually write more things! It legitimized the activity.

Anybody who pitches a story or an idea for a film to an executive, whatever the latest hit is, is what you're comparing it to.

That's just me wanting that supernatural tool to tell a story and also not wanting to be restricted by reality, with how we're telling a tale, because we are a heightened reality on Hannibal. There is a larger-than-life quality to the storytelling when it gets into particulars. I like the idea of being able to dismiss reality, depending on if we can sell it as part of the story.

Like most people, I was not able to start selling my stories right away. So I had many other jobs along the way to becoming a writer, including toy maker, gravedigger, cookware salesman, and assembly line worker. Eventually, I became an elementary teacher and worked with second and fourth graders.