Pat Conroy Quotes

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

Change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die.

In the old days, people would gather around the fire, or they would gather at a tavern, and they'd tell a story. And then, maybe a week later, someone would tell the same story, but with a different twist on it. That's how folk takes evolved.

A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.

My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.

No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.

They say a story loses something with each telling.

I've always admired the tradition of storytellers who sat in the public market and told their stories to gathered crowds. They'd start with a single premise and talk for hours - the notion of one story, ever-changing but never-ending.

There can't be a pure myth, especially when the myth has been handed down in the oral tradition. As the stories are told, they change. If the stories don't change they just die.

Though the Grimms kept about 100 of the tales from the first edition, they changed them a good deal.

We've seen from shows like 'Game of Thrones' that the book can become a seed, which you plant in the ground of great TV creators, and it can sprout out into a big tree.

Everything has changed, but the process of telling a story has not changed. It's like cavemen sitting around the fire; somebody's going to tell the story. Somebody is drawing on the wall. You're communicating. You're trying to learn and teach at the same time. You're your own student and you're your own teacher, but the process is of the communicating.

The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.

Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

I think that we're moving into this new phase of television where audiences are really embracing stories with a beginning, middle, and end.

People's talk and the stories they tell have been engraved on my heart, and some of them have flown into my pen.

We kept moving forward, kept pretty particular about certain things. Don Handfield is really great with story, so we kept working on it from that angle and developed a lot of IP over the years, which we became very proud of.