#teller

My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs. ↗

— Stephen Colbert

#billy #brother #child #competition #cutting

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish. ↗

— Stephen Greenblatt

#father #life-long #line #long #long story

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood. ↗

— Peter Handke

#loses #nation #storytellers

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels. ↗

— P. J. Harvey

#began #come #communication #folk #folk music

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words. ↗

— Frederick Weisel

#failing #frederick-weisel #story #teller #weisel

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

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#evolution #fiction #future #influence #literature

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . . . (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#j-r-r-tolkien #life-and-death #life-story #lord-of-the-rings #lotr