#telling

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#elegant #go #hand #storytelling #style

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#innate #learned #least #listening #looking

What the results are telling them is that the most money is spent in volume by young people. They also see young people as the consumers of tomorrow and are trying to capture their attention from their competitors. ↗

— Marlo Thomas

#attention #capture #competitors #consumers #money

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing. ↗

— Manuel Puig

#always #authors #french #german #great

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there... ↗

— Stephen King

#horror #storytelling #walking

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing? ↗

— Charles Yu

#hearts #identity #lies #mirrors #sense

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense. ↗

— John Dufresne

#fiction #novel #story #storytelling #life

While Leo fussed over his helm controls, Hazel and Frank relayed the story of the fish-centaurs and their training camp. 'Incredible,' Jason said. 'These are really good brownies.' 'That's your only comment?' Piper demanded. He looked surprised. 'What? I heard the story. Fish-centaurs. Merpeople. Letter of intro to the Tiber River god. Got it. But these brownies--' 'I know,' Frank said, his mouth full. 'Try them with Ester's peach preserves.' 'That,' Hazel said, 'is incredibly disgusting.' 'Pass me the jar, man,' Jason said. Hazel and Piper exchanged a look of total exasperation. Boys. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#brownies #eating #esther #food #incredibly-disgusting

Whatever story you're telling, it will be more interesting if, at the end you add, "and then everything burst into flames. ↗

— Brian P. Cleary

#observational-comedy #observations #storytelling #humor

Moments are incredible, but in my fantasy mind I see a Globe company which is renowned throughout the world for what it does with pure storytelling. So that people come and say: it's not just the building, it's the only place you can hear this kind of work. ↗

— Mark Rylance

#come #company #does #fantasy #globe