Quotes

‘Mind share before market share.’ Beth Comstock

‘We lived in the gaps between the stories.’ Margaret Atwood

‘Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.’ Buddha

‘You can’t teach someone to be creative.’ Howard Luck Gossage

‘We aren’t as solid as we once thought. We are embodied but also networks, living inside machines and people’s heads.’ Olivia Laing

‘Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.’ Aristotle

‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ Maya Angelou

‘The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is just that little extra.’ Albert Einstein

‘Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that?’ Neil Gaiman

‘Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.’ Joss Whedon

‘Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.’ Carl Jung

‘Language us a virus.’ William Burroughs

‘The problem is never how to get new innovative thoughts into your mind - but how to get the old one out.’ Dee Hock

‘The engineers of the future will be poets.’ Terence McKenna

‘After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.’ Philip Pullman

‘Failure is a badge of honor. It means you risked failure. And if you don’t risk failure, you’re never going to do anything that’s different from what you’ve already done or what somebody else has done.’ Charlie Kaufman

‘At the darkest moment comes the light.’ Joseph Campbell

‘Here is realization, here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him, the past, the future, majesty, love - if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.’ Walt Whitman

‘Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.’ Robert McKee

‘You can’t ask customers want they want. Not if your goal is to find a breakthrough. Because your customers have trouble imagining a breakthrough. You ought to know what their problems are, what they believe, what stories they tell themselves. But it rarely pays to ask your customers to do your design work for you.’ Seth Godin

‘Language is a weapon.’ Noam Chomsky

‘Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.’ Steven Pressfield

‘A song ain’t nothing but a story set to music.’ Hank Williams Jr

‘The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger’s lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.’ Joseph Campbell

‘Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.’ Albert Camus

‘All the world’s a story.’ Stefano Boscutti

‘I’m a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that’s sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting - whatever it is.’ David Carson

‘Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.’ Madeleine L’Engle

‘Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only two - basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results, all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.’ Peter Drucker

‘The universe is made of stories, not atoms.’ Muriel Rukeyser

‘A great trick that I learned having worked as a screenwriter for many years, the way screenwriters work, is they break the project down into three-act structure: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. I think that is a great way to break down any project, whether it’s a new business or anything at all.’ Steven Pressfield

‘If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.’ Orson Welles

‘A person is what he does, not what he says.’ Stefano Boscutti

‘Creativity can solve any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.’ George Lois

‘The stories we tell literally make the world. If you want to change the world, you need to change your story. This truth applies both to individuals and institutions.’ Michael Margolis

‘A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.’ Dieter Rams

‘Form follows fiction.’ Stefano Boscutti

‘I believe that the best cameraman is one who recognizes the source, the story, as the basis of his work.’ James Wong Howe

‘Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.’ Robert McKee

‘A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or orientation….Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.’ Ben Okri

‘I like you - your eyes are full of language.’ Anne Sexton

‘People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.’ Steven Spielberg

‘I inhale great draughts of space, the east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.’ Walt Whitman

‘Whoever tells the best story wins.’ Annette Simmons

‘I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like.’ Charlie Kaufman

‘All drama is conflict. Without conflict, there is no action. Without action, there is no character. Without character, there is no story.’ Syd Field

‘Leaders use story to author the future.’ Robert McKee

‘Why was Solomon recognized as the wisest man in the world? Because he knew more stories than anyone else. Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.’ Alan Ka

‘If you keep telling the same sad small story, you will keep living the same sad small life.’ Jean Houston

‘The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.’ Joseph Campbell

‘The more passionate that someone is about something, the more you have to listen to them.’ Beth Comstock

‘I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.’ Clive Barker

‘Australian Aborigines say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.’  Robert Moss

‘When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness - I am nothing.’ Virginia Woolf 

‘Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal.’ Howard Gardner

‘Someone, somewhere, is making a product that will make your product obsolete.’ Georges Doriot

‘Confusion is the first step toward clarity.’ Syd Field

‘5 percent of people can think, another 10 percent think they can think, and 85 percent of people would rather die than think.’ Thomas Edison

‘Ultimately, the company is going to be what its people are.’ Phil Knight

‘Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.’ Robert McKee

‘The question isn’t did you fail but did you pick yourself up and move ahead?’ John Gardner 

‘You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, I believe that much unseen is also here.’ Walt Whitman

‘Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.’ Ernest Hemingway

‘If not excellence, what? If not now, when?’ Tom Peters

‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein

‘If you’re going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.’ Joseph Campbell

‘The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.’ Noam Chomsky

‘If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.’ Albert Einstein

‘To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.’ Robert McKee

‘A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.’ Joseph Campbell

‘You will never own the future if you care what people think.’ Cindy Gallop

‘The best weapon a company can have is a great story.’ Bob Iger

‘If you’re competitor focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering. On the internet, we’ve found me too strategies seem not to work very well.’ Jeff Bezos

‘Form is function.’ Stefano Boscutti

‘The single most important resource that we allocate from one day to the next is our own time.’ Andy Grove

‘Emotional capital is the key to success on social media.’ Quy Huy

‘If you want something you have never had, you must be willing to do something you have never done.’ Thomas Jefferson

‘Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners.’ James Stewart 

‘Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune. Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing. Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms. Strong and content I travel the open road.’ Walt Whitman

‘Make your own rules, or make your own grave.’ Stefano Boscutti

‘Good ideas are lucid, pleasing and strange.’ Aristotle

‘The best thinking is done in solitude.’ Thomas Edison

’75 percent of purchases are made by women who, of course, influence the remaining 25 percent.’ Sarah Quinlan 

‘Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.’ Anne Sexton

‘I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. All seems beautiful to me’ Walt Whitman

‘The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets.’ Joseph Campbell

‘Those who tell the stories rule the world.’ Loololma

‘The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.’ Muriel Rukeyser

‘All parts away for the progress of souls, all religion, all solid things, arts, governments - all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe.’ Walt Whitman

‘The shortest distance between two people is a story.’ Patti Digh