Storytelling Quotes

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

Orson Scott Card

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

Vaclav Havel

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

Walter Benjamin

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Walter Benjamin

The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it.

Laurence Sterne

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.

Steven Spielberg

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

Paul Auster