Storytelling Role Quotes

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

Basically, I see myself as a maker of things who knows how to support other makers of things. At the end of the day, I am just committed to helping put good stories out into the world in whatever role is appropriate and needed for that particular project.

I work for ABC. If the thing that ABC is paying me for is storytelling - not to make sure that a costume is exactly right or all those other things - then it is up to me to find the most creative space possible so that that function of my job can happen.

I think storytelling is all about children. We human beings love to hear stories being told - and it first happens when you're a kid.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

To me, I'm a storyteller.

A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.

I think a lot of things are written from experience, but then you become a writer and talk about other people's experience and you tell stories. I mean, you can't just tell your own story all the time.

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

I think of myself as a storyteller.

It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

For a while, the genre seemed to be just about sex and crime. Rappers are storytellers; the stories don't need to be true!

I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.

I do believe in the power of story. I believe that stories have an important role to play in the formation of human beings, that they can stimulate, amaze and inspire their listeners.

Fiction is a place where people can meet, where they take the time to very seriously examine and think about the experiences of other people and about the sorts of moral decisions those characters are making.

It's really important in our society to tell stories, and I feel grateful and honoured that I get to do that in this day and age.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

My job is to help my father tell stories.

Spreading the positivity is just as important as telling the difficult stories.

Stories are told not to preach or counsel people but to reflect the dilemmas of our time.

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

Certain kinds of things that the novel used to do, which was, "Oh, I'm living out here in West Nowhere, Nebraska and I'm curious how the upper class in New York City lives, I guess I'll read a novel about it." We don't have to do that now. You just turn on the TV. Turn on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You can get that information anywhere. Novels don't have to do that anymore.