Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.
When I was in my 20s, I was out of control in terms of what I would do to defend my vision. There are black film-makers and storytellers who take a back seat to just get it done. It's good, but it's not right there. It's been compromised.
We're all born storytellers. It's part of the species. But, more specifically, I suppose a particular combination of sensitivity and trauma made me a writer: an essential disquiet with reality, which required exploration through portrayal.
It's interesting because diversity doesn't just happen by garnishing your omelet with a little bit of parsley. Diversity happens because the people that are telling the stories - the writers, directors, storytellers - want to tell their story.
There's a stigma attached to being an actor. People from 'Big Brother' call themselves actors. There's so much crap. It's not about appreciating that we're here to service the public, that we're storytellers. It doesn't sit comfortably with me.
We're always looking for ways to use technologies to open up new creative expressions for us artistically. So we're constantly thinking about where something like VR may lead us in storytelling or what kind of tool that gives us as storytellers.
I come from a family of Russian immigrant Jews who were all big storytellers, who would get together, and one would try to top the others' stories, and stories would get bigger and bigger. And the lying aspect, the exaggeration, would get large.
I started on the original comics from Stan Lee and all the artists and storytellers did from there, and I got to the graphic novel that Chris Clairmont did, which is the one Stryker comes from - 'God Loves, Man Kills', which is a brilliant story.
If Queen Amezan and Queen Penthesilea could somehow meet in real life, they would recognize each other as sister Amazons. Two tales, two storytellers, two sites far apart in time and place, and yet one common tradition of women who made love and war.
I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'
Honestly, the essence of publishing hasn't changed. Since the days of the cave man carving stuff on the cave walls, people have wanted stories, and storytellers have wanted an audience. That is still the case. The changes are really a matter of format.
We know there needs to be diversity in storytellers telling their own stories. I think there's a beautiful forward movement in that direction with McQueen telling '12 Years A Slave,' with Coogler telling 'Fruitvale,' and with Daniels telling 'The Butler.'
The corporate system dictates what gets made, and the movies are so bad because of the economic structure of Hollywood. The big business takeover of Hollywood is at fault rather than American storytellers - it's what keeps textured movies from getting made.
I've long been interested in the tale-within-a-tale phenomenon. I'm familiar with many tales which use this framework or the device of many people in one place, telling their stories, or multiple storytellers commenting on each others' stories with their own.
I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.
I come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.
Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.
I think 'Overlord' has definitely benefited because I work with every single level designer, and working where we have space to tell the story. That's what it's all about - getting writers and storytellers involved in the team and being a back and forth process.
People would go from village to village with their books in a time of poverty and disease. They would get people around them, and for an hour, these storytellers would change people's lives. I'd always thought I was a reincarnation of that. That's who I want to be.
The tradition of the South is not urban... I think we are a region of storytellers, naturally, just from our tribal instincts. We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance, motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertain each other by talking.
My favourite writers are always great storytellers, like Bruce Springsteen; I adore Bruce Springsteen. I feel like he doesn't beat around the bush, and he doesn't overcomplicate things. He puts things into layman's terms and tells stories that anyone can understand.
Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales.
I love storytellers. When I was growing up, my inspirations were watching Eddie Murphy, Dennis Wolfberg, and Louie Anderson. These guys were great at telling stories, and I made that my own style, talking about things that happened to me and trying to make them funny.
I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.
That's what this industry is all about - supporting artists and supporting storytellers and hearing the audience for what they want and need. There still is a lack of value for what black women want, yet we have proven to be one of the strongest consumers in the marketplace.
I believe that all brands will become storytellers, editors and publishers, all stores will become magazines, and all media companies will become stores. There will be too many of all of them. The strongest ones, the ones who offer the best customer experience, will survive.
I've always liked and appreciated storytellers like Garry Shandling and Bill Cosby - more long-form comedy. So starting in San Francisco, watching all these great comics - Patton Oswalt, Dave Chappelle - you get to see them a bunch, and you go, 'Wow, this is where I need to be.'
I believe that even today we can only tell a simple story without really interfering with gameplay. But in the future, I think it will almost be a requirement of all storytellers when they create games, how they can tell a more complex story without conflicting with the gameplay.
I formed this thing called the Half Foundation, and what I tried to do is quantify hiring practices in Hollywood. Half the population is women, so half of the storytellers should be women. Fifty percent of all the directors in my company are women, and it will forever be that way.
I thought I had to write literature and add my name to the list of great Southern storytellers. Fortunately for me, no one wanted to read any of those stories. They got rejected by everyone. Sometimes, I would get a note saying they liked the writing, but the story simply didn't work.
My first memory was of stories about the past - a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It didn't take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone, and nothing could be done about it.
To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.
The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.
I like the fact that I'm from the South and that I have this rich history behind me. I come from a family of storytellers. They can't just tell you how someone went to the store. They have to tell you who they saw, what they were wearing, what they said, what they had in their grocery cart.
I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.
I was at the University of Miami, and I still had, like, a semester or so left. And through the film school, I found out that Al Gore was launching a new TV network; they were looking for passionate young storytellers to transform television, which was, like, ambiguous but magnificent-sounding.
I work with writers whom I believe to be true storytellers. And because I'm a writer, I pay very keen attention to their vision. I find that so fueling creatively because, in telling those stories, you use everything you've got. You come away with battle scars. It's gratifying and invigorating.
I think it would be bad for storytellers in general if one company was able to seize a 40-50-60% share in storytelling. I don't think monopoly market shares are good for society, and I think they'd be particularly bad for society and storytellers if they were achieved in the storytelling genre.
Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But they manage to grab the attention of the readers right from page one. I'll consider myself a good storyteller the day people believe it's OK to be late for work or postpone deadlines just to finish reading my book.
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.
I've read a hundred fantastic scripts that didn't pan out as films, and I completely put that on the directors. I've also read some mediocre scripts that have ended up being amazing, and I credit that to the directors. They're the storytellers. If you don't have a good storyteller, you really have nothing.
Perhaps storytellers don't need to care as much about the future as executives and investors do. After all, isn't it possible that technology will enable storytellers to connect directly to their audience without the need for anyone to share the programming decisions or the profit in between? Don't bet on it.
I'm not sure I would make a direct connection between having press attention as a young person and being interested in the media as an older person. I came to it more organically, coming from a family of Irish Catholic storytellers. Storytelling is a pastime and important part of my family's history and culture.
I was always fascinated by the Torah, the Bible, in terms of story telling: heroes and villains, morality and flaws. There's no better epic. Also, being part Latin and Jewish means I have a sense of the theatrical. There were always a lot of people in my house. My home was always filled with a lot of storytellers.
People have compared me to Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West, Eminem, and J. Cole. They bring substance and largely are all good storytellers, and those are two of my biggest strengths. It's dope to be compared to people who have longevity in the game because that's the most important thing for me: I want my name to live forever.
Well, here's what I'll say: The storytellers of 'Lost' have taken us on a pretty great journey, and there have been questions along the way, and criticisms along the way, but if you look at the totality of the show, or the experience of it as a whole, I think as long as you look at it from that perspective you'll be happy.
'Thrones' would be the perfect platform to send a progressive message because right now, our politicians aren't telling us any truths. It's hard to find a good, meaningful message, so I think it's up to storytellers, television shows, and films to have an impact on the world conversation. Is that not what film and television is for?
Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'
Look at the world of both film and indie games, and you'll find a startling similarity between the two when it comes to creating the perfect horror story. The tricks storytellers pull to make your blood run cold never change; a creaking floorboard, the eerie feeling of being watched, wandering into a world filled with unspeakable terror.
I am not attempting to preserve culture, or record actual events or stories. Instead I bow my head in gratitude to those storytellers who have gone before and paved a way for me play in their stomping grounds. Doubtless those who want to be offended, will - allowing me to make them happy, too, which pleases me as much as it pleases them.