Allan Gurganus Quotes

I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

But if we have people who have the power to tell a story, there will always be readers.

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

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.

When I was little, I always used to like to tell stories cuz it was entertaining to people.

People love stories. They need stories.

I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.

[I have a] fondness for telling stories, like the Arab storytellers on the marketplace. ... I will never grow tired of [telling] stories [and] I make the mistake of thinking that everyone has the same enthusiasm!

The most important thing to realize is that everyone is capable of telling a story.

People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

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.

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.

The sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.

It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.

Storytelling is the important thing.

To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.

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.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

I always like to tell a story.

Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.

Storytelling is my currency. It's my only worth. The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out.

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.

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.