Top 100 Storytelling Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I open at the close.”

— J.K. Rowling

52. “No matter what you do, your job is to tell your story.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk

53. “I’ll be a story in your head. But that’s OK. We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know; it was the best.”

— Steven Moffat

54. “There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you'll be free if you truly wish to be.”

— Roald Dahl

55. “The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero.”

— Joseph Campbell

56. “Stories matter. Many stories matter.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

57. “You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?”

— Terry Pratchett

58. “I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.”

— J.K. Rowling

59. “Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”

— Neil Gaiman

60. “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”

— J. Nozipo Maraire

61. “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

— Stephen King

62. “Don’t talk about it; write.”

— Ray Bradbury

63. “Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.”

— Shannon L. Alder

64. “I’m looking for someone to share in an adventure.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

65. “We read to know we're not alone.”

— William Nicholson

66. “And so the lion fell in love with the lamb.”

— Stephenie Meyer

67. “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”

— Brandon Sanderson

68. “Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”

— Philip José Farmer

69. “You have to finish things – that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”

— Neil Gaiman

70. “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”

— C. S. Lewis

71. “To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.”

— Alfred Hitchcock

72. “Don’t judge a book by its cover ’til you’ve read the book.”

— Jamie Lee Curtis

73. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

— Stephen King

74. “I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.”

— J.K. Rowling

75. “You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

76. “The stories we love best do live in us forever.”

— J.K. Rowling

77. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

78. “Human connections are deeply nurtured in the field of shared story.”

— Jean Houston

79. “Every life has a purpose. Share your story and you may help someone find their own.”

— Demi Lovato

80. “Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

— Ray Bradbury

81. “Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.”

— J.K. Rowling

82. “For in dreams we enter a world that is entirely our own. Let them swim in the deepest ocean or glide over the highest cloud.”

— J.K. Rowling

83. “I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.”

— Isaac Asimov

84. “We read books to find out who we are.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

85. “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”

— Nicole Krauss

86. “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

— Orson Welles

87. “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

88. “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

— Jane Austen

89. “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

90. “Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move this idea forward.”

— Michael Scott

91. “Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

— Garrison Keillor

92. “A lie is just a great story that someone ruined with the truth.”

— Barney Stinson

93. “No, this is not the beginning of a new chapter in my life; this is the beginning of a new book! That first book is already closed, ended, and tossed into the seas; this new book is newly opened, has just begun! Look, it is the first page! And it is a beautiful one!”

— C. JoyBell C.

94. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

95. “You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

— Jodi Picoult

96. “Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”

— Dr. Seuss

97. “If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.”

— Anaïs Nin

98. “I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself.”

— Karen Marie Moning

99. “There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before.”

— Joseph Campbell

100. “If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear.”

— William Shakespeare