Ian Hislop Quotes

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

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

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite.

There's nothing better than a personal story.

Well, anything can happen and it happened to me. I learned everybody has a story.

Everyone has a story.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living.

A lot of people are frightened by old age - by being around people who are, basically, on their way out - but I'm fascinated by it. It's an amazing thing to be around someone who has had a life well lived.

The further you go, what, I'm gonna wait til I'm 80? Naw, I'm tellin' my story now. I was just moved. I was moved to tell my story. You know? People write books all the time.

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

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. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

I hope before I am getting too old and when my mind is still functioning, I can tell some better stories.

The richest most meaningful stories are found in small places: made, carried, crafted, told, and retold by apparently unimportant people.

Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.

Yes, the experience of all stages of life are valuable, not just of youth.

Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the 'Washington Post.'

I wouldn't go out of my way to experience the indignity of middle-age just because it might be good meat for a story.

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.

It's good to pass on stories.