Neil Gaiman Quotes

The human world is made of stories, not people.

It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.

The human race has always defined itself through narration. That isn't going to change just because we've gone electronic. What is changing is that now we're allowing corporations to tell our stories for us.

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

The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right.

Human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors.

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

I think there is a human instinct to tell stories, no matter who you are or where you live.

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

I come from a family of storytellers.

A good urban legend is something that actually did happen but it got twisted in the telling over time.

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

We are surrounded by story.

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.

Stories live forever. Storytellers don't.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

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.

Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.

People have always told tales. Long before humanity learned to write and gradually became literate, everybody told tales to everybody else and everybody listened to everybody else's tales. Before long it became clear that some of the still illiterate storytellers told more and better tales than others, that is, they could make more people believe their lies.

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.

I've been transformed by stories, and I think that storytelling is definitely sacred. I take it very seriously because my life has been changed, whether it was a movie, a play, a piece of writing, poetry, a painting.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.