Hervey Allen Quotes

History has its truth; and so has legend hers.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

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

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

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful

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.

Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

Already when I was very young, I was a fabulador. I loved to give my own version of stories that everybody already knew.

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.

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.

Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.

I don't want people thinking they know me instead of the character. Steve McQueen has loads of stories about him - who knows what's true? But it's great for people to fictionalize rather than know the truth.

Storytelling isn't an Escher staircase.

Myths are part of our DNA. We're a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.

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

I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.

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.

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

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

Fairly tales are myths, and myths are only myths because there's a grain of truth in them.

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.

I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.

One of the things I find exciting about Joan of Arc is how clearly the story of her life reveals the creation of myth, a process in which every one of us is involved - every one of us who tells stories and all those who listen, each informing the other.