A Quote by Gao Xingjian

When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.

Gao Xingjian

Quote Topics

Details Give Got Story Telling

Quote Author

Gao Xingjian
Chinese - Novelist
Born: January 4, 1940

The elements of a good story are most definitely details, little bitty details. That does it, especially when you're describing, when you're setting the scene and everything. It's like you're painting a picture, so details are very important. Also, the music gotta be right. The music can really set the tone for the story and let you know what the story is gonna be about, but definitely, it's the vibe in the place where you at and the detail.

Big Boi

I think that people have to have a story. When you tell a story, most people are not good storytellers because they think it's about them. You have to make your story, whatever story it is you're telling, their story. So you have to get good at telling a story so they can identify themselves in your story.

Larry Winget

I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.

George Saunders

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

George V. Higgins

One of the things that makes characters real is details. Life offers a lot of details. You just have to choose and use them wisely. When you give them to fictional people and a fictional story, their purpose and their meaning changes, so it's best to see the version in the book as fiction entirely, wherever it started out.

Nick Earls

I don't beat at the details, but I do always keep in mind that anything that isn't A) moving the story forward or B) enlarging my understanding of the central characters has to be sacrificed. I have huge folders of details - research - with a story like Netherlands. Only a very small part of it gets used. The old iceberg analogy again.

Jim Shepard

'Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.

Jo Nesbo

There's definitely a delicate line you have to walk in telling someone else's story that's not quite as delicate in telling your own story. I think when I'm working on a personal story, there's less pressure to try to get it exactly right.

Box Brown

Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.

Jo Nesbo

I always have the best story at the party. Anyone telling a story at a party is like, 'No, no, you've got to listen to my story!' I'm like, 'Step aside, everybody. I'm going to blow the doors off this place.'

Mike Birbiglia

I came across an old story of mine that I'd written a decade ago. The main joke of the story is that a mother is telling her children about how she met their father online. The majority of memories the mother has all have to do with really funny links he sent her, a music download that she loved, etc. - and because of these superficial details she fell in love with the father. Reading it today, it's hardly a dystopian story; it's simply a realistic story about how people actually meet.

Alexander Weinstein

The Negro. The South. These are the details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared, and detested. I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in a number of states, or a member of any 'inferior' group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same.

John Howard Griffin

Each of the 'Toy Story's are telling an emotional story, but they're comedic. They're so successful creatively in terms of the stories they're telling. And they're pretty grounded.

Nicholas Stoller

My clothes have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That's why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story. They are still telling it.