Storytelling Impact Quotes

The telling of stories creates the real world.

Most great leaders are also great communicators. Great leaders have learned how to persuade so their objectives can be reached. The most powerful device to persuade is story. Stating facts and figures is not memorable. Emotionally connecting your audience to your idea through story will move them.

My father leaving the family shaped who I was and how I looked at the world. By the same token, my father telling me fairy tales that he had made up shaped me profoundly, too.

You may not quite understand the cinematic tricks that go behind the making of a film, but as long as you feel it, I think that's the important thing.

They say a story loses something with each telling.

Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

The film itself should interact with the audience. In the case of 'Queen of Katwe', people are laughing, sobbing and dancing. I am taking them on a ride... It is not like I am asking them for handouts.

You are the effect of your story, that's all.

At the premieres, I always watch the audience. If a child asks to go to the bathroom, I know I've failed.

I love 'Peter Pan' to death. It's one of the most influential pieces of storytelling in my life. It made a huge impact on how I grew up. I love the cartoon. I love the 2003 version.

I don't think it's good when entertainment tries to proselytize and I don't think people ultimately want someone showing up in their living room and just hectoring at them all day long. But if you can create a space where people are caught up in something - whether it's a drama, a comedy, a romantic comedy, or science fiction - that's when people give over their minds and allow their emotions to flow.

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

If you are true at telling the story, it will get a good audience, and the required numbers.

It's not the side of the bigger army that wins. It's the country that tells a better story.

Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.

Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

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.

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.

A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know the operation has been performed, but everyone feels the effect.

Movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

By sharing an experience, or creating an experience that we all go through where the character survives - though not easily, I always say that it's victory at a price - does give people hope.

The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.