Storytelling Effect Quotes

I always loved watching movies because I loved what certain moments inside of films did to me.

The more Ronald Reagan repeated a story, the more he believed it and the more he resisted information that undermined premises.

I have been a Christian all my life, but it's impossible to be so deeply involved in these stories without it making you think again, and without it making you consciously aware of the people involved.

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.

When something is dramatized, it provokes a much more emotive response than just hearing a story on the news.

I remember watching an Iranian film, 'A Separation.' When the film ended, I felt like going to Iran, getting that family together, hug them and just being with them.

After 'A Perfect Storm' came out, I heard from a young reader, who had suffered a similar background as 'Arizona,' that I had helped her to find peace. That was the most amazing thing in the world to me.

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

What more can life hold, than to know that because of your story, somebody out there has decided to read again!

What makes a story is how well it manages to connect with the reader, the visceral effect it has.

The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

'Your Name''s success told me movies still have the power to connect with society. As a medium, it still has a power that resonates.

Because of 'Wasn't Expecting That,' I've had a lot of people come up to me and say how I've written their lives or their grandparents' lives. It means the world to me that I helped in the tiniest way.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

I have experienced power as a journalist. On three different occasions, when I wrote about individual immigrants or refugees, the article - or, in one case, my presence in the courtroom - appeared to positively change the outcome of their cases.

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

When entertainment works the best, you're creating an apparatus to convey emotions.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

I don't think writing fiction has changed my worldview.

A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.

If people can come out of 'Bin Roye' feeling even just a little bit of what this character felt, and touched your heart, that's enough for me.

Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader.

But the people who took the bus didn't experience the city as we experienced the city. The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.

That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.