Jonathan Swift Quotes

Humans are kind of story-propagating creatures. If you think of how we spend our days, think of all the time you spend on entertainment. How much of your entertainment centers around stories? Most pieces of music tell stories. Even hanging out with your friends, you talk, you tell stories to each other. They're all stories. We live in stories.

When I'm writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we're cavemen, we're sitting around the fire, and I'm telling you stories. If I bore you, you're probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.

I love stories. When I'm writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we're cavemen, we're sitting around the fire, and I'm telling you stories. If I bore you, you're probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.

People need stories; they want stories. They always will.

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.

The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

To survive, you must tell stories.

At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

But stories somehow lengthen when begun.

A good story needs only a good storyteller.

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.

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

Time is what allows stories to spread into people's consciousness.

If you want somebody to tell you a story, one of the most easiest and effective ways is if you're telling them a story.

People love stories. They need stories.

I think there is a human instinct to tell stories, no matter who you are or where you live.

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

We are the only animal that tells stories.

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

It's important to tell stories, and it's a worthwhile thing to do.

We are the storytelling animal.

Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.