Italo Calvino Quotes

I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

If you look at any ancient civilization, they've all used fantasy stories to train the young.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

I get a lot of inspiration from research in mythology and folklore. I find that, you know, stories people told each other thousands of years ago are still relevant now.

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

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

In the ancient times, bards went around singing the epics, which were storehouses of philosophy.

I think of myself... as a troubadour, a village storyteller, the guy in the shadows of the campfire.

Mythology is a vast body of knowledge that has not been tapped.

All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.

Stories always seem to get better with age.

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.

As storytellers, you're always somehow creating history.

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth'.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

To tell the truth, fairytales have never gone out of style. They have been told and retold for thousands of years, finding new shapes and structures with each new generation of tellers.

You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.

From the beginning of time, we've told stories, Shamans and Medicine People, and not to be pompous about it, but I feel like that is the lineage I take down and where I come from. There is magic to storytelling.

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.