Bryce Courtenay Quotes

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

When you tell a story you automatically talk about traditions, but they're never separate from the people, the human implications. You're talking about your connections as a human being.

The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.

Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.

It's good to pass on stories.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

I come from a family of storytellers.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening.

In my family, telling stories is just a way of life.

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

I like the fact that I'm from the South and that I have this rich history behind me. I come from a family of storytellers. They can't just tell you how someone went to the store. They have to tell you who they saw, what they were wearing, what they said, what they had in their grocery cart.

I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.

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

The books that I'm writing, you can write them only when you're amongst your people. You're not going to find it on the Internet. You're not going to hear it there.