Top 100 Storytelling Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”

— Robert McKee

Also featured in: Quotes About Ideas

2. “There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”

— Terry Pratchett

Also featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

Also featured in: Healing Quotes

4. “Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Also featured in: Diversity Quotes

5. “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

— Stephen King

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes, Fiction Quotes, Quotes About Writing

6. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

— Charles Dickens

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Meaningful Quotes, Challenges Quotes, Powerful Quotes

7. “Maybe stories are just data with a soul.”

— Brené Brown

Also featured in: Soul Quotes, Quotes About Stories

8. “Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”

— Terry Pratchett

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes, Fiction Quotes, Imagination Quotes

9. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

— Philip Pullman

Also featured in: Meaningful Quotes, Quotes About Writing, Quotes About Humanity, Meaning of Life Quotes

10. “Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.”

— Neil Gaiman

Also featured in: Quotes About Writing, Artist Quotes, Creative Quotes, Honesty Quotes

11. “When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.”

— Stephen King

Also featured in: Quotes About Writing, Quotes About Stories

12. “The truth about stories is, that’s all we are.”

— Thomas King

13. “It simply isn’t an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

Also featured in: Imagination Quotes, Adventure Quotes

14. “Storytelling is the oldest form of education.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

15. “Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

16. “There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.”

— J.K. Rowling

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes

17. “Everything starts with a story.”

— Joseph Campbell

Also featured in: Quotes About Stories

18. “If you write a hundred short stories and they’re all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.”

— Ray Bradbury

Also featured in: Persistence Quotes, Quotes About Writing, Practice Quotes, Quotes About Stories

19. “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”

— Destin Sparks

Also featured in: Art Quotes, Photography Quotes

20. “Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”

— Stephen King

Also featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading

21. “Write what you know.”

— Mark Twain

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes, Knowledge Quotes

22. “Story is king. Everything else is slave to story.”

— Casey Neistat

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes, Important Quotes

23. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

— Neil Gaiman

Also featured in: Imagination Quotes, Inspiring Quotes

24. “In the end, we’ll all become stories.”

— Margaret Atwood

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes, Creative Quotes, Quotes About Stories

25. “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

— C. S. Lewis

Also featured in: Life Quotes, Quotes About Books And Reading

26. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

— Anton Chekhov

Also featured in: Interesting Quotes, Fiction Quotes, Quotes About Writing

27. “Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read.”

— Cassandra Clare

Also featured in: Life Quotes, Quotes About Books And Reading, Fiction Quotes

28. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”

— Frank Herbert

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Quotes About Writing

29. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

— Terry Pratchett

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes, Fiction Quotes, Firsts Quotes

30. “In order to write about life first you must live it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Experience Quotes, Quotes About Writing

31. “Imagine a new story for your life and start living it.”

— Paulo Coelho

Also featured in: Imagination Quotes, Quotes About Stories

32. “I write to discover what I know.”

— Flannery O'Connor

Also featured in: Quotes About Writing, Knowledge Quotes, Artist Quotes, Creative Quotes

33. “You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything.”

— Beth Comstock

Also featured in: Marketing Quotes

34. “Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Also featured in: Moving On Quotes, Past Quotes

35. “We’re all stories, in the end.”

— Steven Moffat

Also featured in: Creative Quotes, Quotes About Stories

36. “Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

Also featured in: Quotes About Skills

37. “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Also featured in: Quotes About Hope, Quotes About Children

38. “You fail only if you stop writing.”

— Ray Bradbury

Also featured in: Failure Quotes, Quotes About Writing, Giving Up Quotes, Creative Quotes

39. “But how could you live and have no story to tell?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

40. “Nobody is a villain in their own story. We’re all the heroes of our own stories.”

— George R.R. Martin

Also featured in: Perspective Quotes, Creative Quotes, Hero Quotes

41. “Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”

— Terry Pratchett

Also featured in: Imagination Quotes

42. “Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”

— Neil Gaiman

Also featured in: Creative Quotes

43. “We are the stories we tell ourselves.”

— Joan Didion

Also featured in: Reflection Quotes, Identity Quotes, Quotes About Stories

44. “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

— Anne Lamott

Also featured in: Experience Quotes, Truth Quotes

45. “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

— Muriel Rukeyser

Also featured in: Universe Quotes, Imagination Quotes, Quotes About Stories

46. “A villain is just a victim whose story hasn’t been told.”

— Chris Colfer

Also featured in: Quotes About Stories

47. “People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.”

— Terry Pratchett

Also featured in: Quotes About Stories

48. “All the stories are true.”

— Cassandra Clare

Also featured in: Quotes About Stories

49. “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

— Neil Gaiman

Also featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading

50. “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”

— Anna Quindlen

Also featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading, Reading Quotes