Bernie Siegel Quotes

Data loses to story. Every time. Your statistics don’t trump my experience.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

But if we have people who have the power to tell a story, there will always be readers.

Stories are more than compelling facts. People remember stories more than they remember statistics.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

A story is much more effective than a statistic.

The essence to me of all good drama is argument.

Stories are one of the most powerful forces of persuasion available to us, especially stories that fit in with our view of what the world should be like. Facts can be contested. Stories are far trickier. I can dismiss someone's logic, but dismissing how I feel is harder.

To me good storytelling is about journeys. It's about people's journeys, people's discoveries and how they deal with those discoveries; circumstances that put people in different situations.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

A good story should change the way you see the world.

Neurologists say that our brains are programmed much more for stories than for abstract ideas. Tales with a little drama are remembered far longer than any slide crammed with analytics.

I'm a social writer in the sense that I want to record, but not in the sense of trying to change people's minds.

It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.

People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

Children and teens take in stories to the deepest imaginable level. What we put on the page can change the people they'll become and the course of their lives.

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions.

A good story often increases the salability of an item without increasing its actual value.

It is stories - both real and fictional - that can captivate hearts, change minds and, in the most powerful examples, spur action.

There's this amplification that happens anytime you tell a story. You let it go out into the world. It's the most beautiful thing. All I can do is look at it in wonder and amazement.

I think that fiction has a certain power.

If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.

A magic trick of any sort works because you tell yourself a story about what you see. And politicians use this all the time in their own way by throwing a load of statistics at you when things don't quite follow and then saying, 'So therefore blah,' and you believe that 'blah' thing because of the confusion that's come before.

Anecdotes are sometimes the best vehicles of truth, and if striking and appropriate are often more impressive and powerful than argument.

Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.