John Barth Quotes

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

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.

History shows us that the songs - the myth, the experience and the emotion - live longer the less you explain.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.

All the great history has been written with passion …. Fiction is history from below.

I am a storyteller, and I take great pride in the storytelling and a great joy.

I am a storyteller by trade.

I want to link together ancient forms of storytelling and the future.

Compared to other forms of drama, performance art is often thought of as inaccessible and overly artsy. I prefer to think of it as storytelling, something that has been with us through the ages and a part of every culture.

I've always been fascinated with storytelling.

If you go back to early folk, it's all storytelling; that's exactly what it is: some guy telling a story in a pub to 50 people with a guitar, you know.

Stories that can be told through language and words don't need to be filmed.

For thousands of years, humans have used the art of storytelling to motivate and persuade.

Literature is the memory of humanity.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests.

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing.

I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.

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

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

I think storytelling is storytelling. It doesn't matter what format it's shot on.