#storyteller

Stories are masks of God. That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm. Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth. Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God. So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them. ↗

— Melanie Tem

#buddha #children #god #jesus #joseph-campbell

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death. ↗

— George Pelecanos

#storyteller #writing #death

When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller. ↗

— Robert McKee

#emotion #experience #mood #museums #story

The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning. The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#fiction #fictional #life #meaning #pattern

Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller. ↗

— Kevin Spacey

#capacity #directing #film #good #had

I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in. ↗

— Nicholas Meyer

#anything #before #difference #else #filmmaker

No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or you're not. ↗

— John Milius

#either #storyteller #writer #you

And meanwhile, the storytellers like me and Anderson, Silverberg... we tell stories. People like them. They want to know how it comes out, they want to know what the ending is. ↗

— Jerry Pournelle

#comes #ending #how #know #like

God made man because he loves to hear stories, Alessandro said. That's a good story, huh? ↗

— Tom Spanbauer

#storytellers #love

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet." ("A Teller of Tales") ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#literature #storytellers #storytelling #men