Storytelling Significance Quotes

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

Thank God, 50 years ago I learned that our entire business is all based on two things; a great song and a great story. Film, television, if you don't have that story, nothing else matters. You don't call anybody else or direct anybody. The same with a song. A great song can make the worst singer in the world a star.

Stories are really important to people and can really change the way they understand, and even live, their lives. As such, I don't agree much with people who say, 'Calm down, it's just a story.'

And in stories, endings matter.

. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.

I think a story is an attention grabber. I think it's a truth conveyor. Those are two great features of a good story.

There are definitely some stories worth telling and I think there's something to be said for telling your story.

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens-second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?

If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).

Whatever kind of story you're telling, whether it's a genre piece for a comic book or whatever it is, it has importance because it's all a metaphor for the existence of our being.

If there isn't a deep core reason for a film existing, what is the point? For me to be known as a filmmaker that makes films that have a point, I'm stoked.

Some stories, she’d say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.

The power of storytelling is exactly this: to bridge the gaps where everything else has crumbled.

Sanitising stories, leaching out all of the sense of danger and the darkness out of the stories, actually reduces them and stops them from doing what they're supposed to do, which is teach us how to manage our lives.