James A. Michener Quotes

I'm a lover of film and storytelling. I believe that I was put on earth to tell stories, and I'm not interested in telling the same stories over and over and over again.

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

This is my life - I want to tell stories. There is something huge inside me that pushes me to tell stories, and tell stories for an audience and everybody.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

I love being a part of storytelling, so whether I'm getting to do that on Survivor, or do it through kids' adventure books, or directing a movie, it's all sort of the same: Once Upon a Time...

I'm interested in stories. I think I'm a bit of a pathfinder.

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

To me, the most important thing is to tell a good story. If I can do that, I think that enlightenment, respect of nature, etc. follows.

I don't want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

The natural milieu I inhabit is more in epic storytelling.

I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.

Artists should always think of themselves as cosmic instruments for storytelling.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

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.'

As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

I believe in fairy tales. They are the basis of all our performance of storytelling and film-making - when we twist the real events of the world into something that offers us hope - and I believe in that.