Brandon Stanton Quotes

I know I have a caption that I'm going to use when somebody tells me something I've never heard before. It's very rarely a thought, a philosophy, when somebody says, 'Oh, I don't like cheese' or 'Oh, I think the government should be overthrown,' because so many people share these thoughts. But what people don't share is stories.

I'm a songwriter, and people will tell you the greatest stories about their lives, whether you want to hear it or not.

There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life.

I'm trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.

Everybody has their story to tell.

I'm not the go-to guy. Everybody is trying to tell their story and have different ways of telling it.

Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediums—and if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

You could perhaps better tell the story of a place by writing of a tiny village as a sort of prism into the bigger issues the culture was facing. It struck me as a better way to learn about a place, or at least a different way, than just going to interview the president. So I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there. But I'm just amazed.

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

I'm ready for conventions. You know what's interesting, the sort of questions that Lost raises are of a different sort from this movie. In other words, Lost is about figuring out the world of the show, whereas this one seems to raise questions about the world that we know. But I'm happy to entertain both.

I love memoirs, particularly obscure ones because the writer is usually a regular guy just telling what happened to him and to his friends. What these tales lack in artfulness they make up for in passion and authenticity. For a writer of fiction, they are solid gold. I have stolen so much from memoirs it's ridiculous.

It's probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell. If you're going to spend two years of your life on something it has to matter to you, you have to be passionate about it.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.

Quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.

It's nice to dig deeper into people who may look one way but always have a story to tell. I obviously write about that a lot.

I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story.

For me, storytelling is all about how we learn about each other. I'm so curious about people, what makes them tick, why they are who they are, and how we all relate to each other, despite the fact that we may not think that we do.

I would write about issues and people I met along the way, but not about the process and the life of being on the road.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.

All I’ve ever wanted to do is take stills of people, or take documentaries about people, and try to express to an audience how somebody lives next door. You know what I mean? Just how similar we all are as individuals.

Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story.

If you put your personal stories out there people always connect.

I make films because I am endlessly fascinated by people. I'm fascinated immediately to know about the lives that are going on around me. That is what drives me. And that is because everybody matters, everybody is there to be cared about, everybody is interesting and everybody is the potential central character in a story. Judging people is not acceptable.