Jennifer McMahon Quotes

Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.

I'm interested in authentic experience and the essence of that creative place, and where those myths begin and where they become real on any level.

I want to be remembered as a storyteller more than someone who had something meaningful to say.

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

The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

I've always been into having stories told to me. I was a voracious reader, my father was also a teller of tales; and the kind of Baron Munchausen proxy of a tall tale was much more interesting than a true tale.

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.

No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

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 don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

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

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

The thing is, fairytales were once a very gritty way for people to dialogue about aspects of life.

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.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

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.

You know, there's always someone in mind when I'm writing. You know, it's all comes from somewhere inside.

I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It's an incredibly nourishing process; it's probably the closest I come to having a religion.

A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.

I write stories that are already in the air, and I think it's important to have the correct listening device to tune in to that frequency.

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