A Quote by John Tiffany

You can only really get to any truth by telling peoples' stories. — © John Tiffany
You can only really get to any truth by telling peoples' stories.
Sometimes I don't tell the truth, which is telling the truth about not telling the truth. I think people don't tell the truth when they're afraid that something bad's going to happen if they tell the truth. I say things all the time that I could really get into trouble for, but they kind of blow over.
My real purpose in telling middle-school students stories was to practice telling stories. And I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times. And the way I would justify it to the head teacher if he came in or to any parents who complained was, look, I'm telling these great stories because they're part of our cultural heritage. I did believe that.
I feel the weight of just telling the truth. There really is no weight to telling the truth. It's a little scary sometimes, but if you tell the truth, you don't have to be looking over your shoulder.
What's neat about TV is you get really rich, an opportunity to tell really rich stories over the course of 20 hours. Film is cool because it's an hour and a half to two hours. You go on an adventure and by the end it's all cleaned up. Maybe in a franchise you have three chapters of a great story but in TV you can really get deep. You have more time to tell stories so I would definitely not rule out doing television in the future because I think it's a great medium for telling stories.
People who are deceptive themselves have a really good ear for deception. They know when somebody's telling the truth or not, and so one of the ways around that is to always be telling the truth - or some version of it.
I don't think it's going to be possible for the next generation of writers to tell stories without telling stories about telling stories.
I need to keep my story count high. I'm trying to get as many stories in my hour as is humanly possible. We're telling more stories in our hour than any national newscast has in the history of this business, I think.
I think that stories, and the telling of stories, are the foundations of human communication and understanding. If children all over the country are watching films, asking questions and telling their stories, then the world will eventually be a better place.
Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.
My stories are not Christianized at all. I don't even have any Christians in my stories. What they are, are stories about ordinary people going through extraordinary circumstances in which I'm exploring truth. How light overcomes darkness in a way that's unmistakable to anyone who has any kind of faith.
So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.
I learned as a really young kid, when my dad was telling me one story and my mom was telling me another that, even as a 5-year-old boy, there was no way that both of these stories are true. Something in the middle is true, and I have to figure out what it is, what the truth is, and I never did quite figure that out.
We're always just telling stories, and stories are always just approximations of the truth. It's never the truth exactly.
I notice a lot of younger artists have difficulty telling stories. They might have short stories where they express themselves well, but they don't really know how to tell stories with characters. That craft just passed them by.
I have always had such sincere love for truth, that I have often begun by telling stories for the purpose of getting truth to enter the heads of those who could not appreciate its charms.
My first book came out again - the re-issue from 2001. I was rereading it to make sure that I didn't miss any mistakes, and I didn't know who had written some of these stories. I really didn't. I am a different person now. It's weird. I think if stories are good, they have to have a life of their own that's independent of the writer. I like to think of my characters out there in other peoples' heads. That's a nice thing to think about.
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