Joseph Campbell Quotes

I used to love to sit and listen to the old people talk about yesterday. There's a lot of good information there.

I heard stories from my mother's mother who was an American Indian. She was spiritual, although she did not go to church, but she had the hum. She used to tell me stories of the rivers.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.

Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human.

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.

I love telling stories. I think of myself as a storyteller, and I don't feel bound by being just a singer or an actress. First, I'm a storyteller, and history is stories - the most compelling stories. There is a lot you can find out about yourself through knowing about history. I have always been attracted to things that are old. I have just always found such things interesting and compelling.

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

Folktales are real.

If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that's what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

When our ancestors crouched about the camp fire at night, they told each other tales of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, to hold back the terrors of the night. Such tales comforted and entertained, diverted and educated those who listened, and helped shape their sense of the world and their place in it.

Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity.

I didn't learn stories, I just absorbed them.

My aunt Geraldine was the unofficial historian and storyteller. She had all the information about family members and the gossip that came out of the church because we were very much part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. At family gatherings, the older folk had the floor, had pride of place, and it was their stories I remember.

In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.

My people have called upon me to speak to you. The red man has no books, and when he wishes to make known his views...like his father before him...he speaks with his mouth. He is afraid of writing. When he speaks he knows what he says; the Great Spirit hears him. Writing is the invention of the pale faces;

History is merely gossip.

Some of the most learned of the people were chosen to make known the lives of those lords in songs.

Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

Where I come from, we sing poetry.

I was brought up telling stories, when I was a kid, in the tiny village where I grew up. Storytelling was a tradition.

My mother was an oral storyteller. She would tell stories over and over again.