Halldor Laxness Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.

If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.

The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always.

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.

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.

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

The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.

Folktales are real.

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.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm.

What the Greeks and Romans considered myths, we consider fairy tales. We can see how very clearly the myths, which emanated from all cultures, had a huge influence on the development of the modern fairy tale.

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.

Some of the most learned of the people were chosen to make known the lives of those lords in songs.

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

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.

So much Western storytelling comes from Scandinavia. I've read that in the past, storytellers would travel to Iceland and exchange stories. It's kind of the birthplace of great storytelling.

The old storytellers took the stories that meant something to them and rearranged the pieces to say something.