Storytelling Purpose Quotes

My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.

My quest has always been to get my story to the rest o' the people.

I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.

I'm proud to be a crime novelist. What I've chosen is the best way to convey the questions I'm trying to raise.

The point of what I do is that it doesn't really matter what a book or a story is as long it moves you, informs you, challenges you, entertains you, or changes you.

God made man because he loved to listen to stories.

You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved because the movie is almost always bad when you do that.

An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand - it's about making people care.

The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.

I think you have to ask yourself, what is the point of the script? What is the script selling? Because all scripts are political, every story is political. It either challenges or reinforces some schism or stereotype. So what is the project going to say at the end of the day? What does it tell you about the world, or what does it challenge in terms of your world?

If you're trying to do multiple agendas, you'll confuse yourself as a storyteller. If you have one purpose, everything else will fall into place.

I think I was always meant to write dark stories.

I've wanted to direct for a long time, but it had to be a story I wanted to tell. The writer's job is to find the story that he should tell.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.

I think we need to tell stories that reflect our world.

The reason I'm a writer is to understand other people and myself more. The reason I'm a writer is to dramatize stories about human beings so that it improves my life. So that's a very selfish thing.

In the past, the U.S. was the centre of the world, where everything was happening. I think my stories have always sought to question this, maybe even criticise it.

What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you're in it.

The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.

Everything in a novel has to be intentional, even the things that aren't.

Filmmakers tell stories to explore human nature, which is always a flawed thing.

And that is how I employ my time in cinema, saying things about people who I think have touched us in terms of our value judgement and by example.

Sometimes you can have a great scene but it just doesn't need to be in the movie. If it's not progressing the plot, not progressing the story, not adding to the momentum, or if it's not purposefully serving a breath - it has got to go.

I am a director because I believe in my own impulses and my own point of view, and that belief encourages me to tell stories that will move, provoke, and change people. But I became a director because I wanted to be a part of the world.

I think, in some ways, that is the balm of stories, of fables, of tales: it's the way we're wired. We have always needed to distill what we're going through and try to understand it by looking either backwards or forwards. And the hardest is to look in the now.