#story

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#accidental #both #bubble #conversational #created

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes. A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#inspirational #meaning #purpose #reading #storytelling

Storytelling in general is a communal act. Throughout human history, people would gather around, whether by the fire or at a tavern, and tell stories. One person would chime in, then another, maybe someone would repeat a story they heard already but with a different spin. It's a collective process. ↗

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#already #another #around #collective #communal

The Internet is allowing us to get back to what's really more natural, which is that storytelling is a shared thing. It's our natural way to be communal. ↗

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#back #communal #get #internet #more

To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse - we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light. ↗

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#excuse #generally #gives #got #gratuitous

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature. ↗

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#all things #arrived #became #columbia #french

A big part of making music is the discovery aspect, is the surprise aspect. That's why I think I'll always love sampling. Because it involves combining the music fandom: collecting, searching, discovering music history, and artifacts of recording that you may not have known existed and you just kind of unlock parts of your brain, you know? ↗

— Gotye

#aspect #because #big #brain #collecting

At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#advantages #constraints #equal #evolutionary #explaining

How it came to pass that man, originally taught, as we doubt not he was, to know and to worship the true Jehovah, is found, at so early a period of his history, a worshiper of baser objects, it is foreign to our present purpose to inquire. ↗

— Simon Greenleaf

#doubt #early #foreign #found #his

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves. ↗

— Susan Griffin

#after #am #anyone #away #been