Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.

Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity.

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

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.

And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies.

Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.

I believe all literature started as gossip.

They say a story loses something with each telling.

I don't think that there's a target audience at all. These stories were in circulation. The stories were told by men, told in the marketplace by men, but also behind doors by women, but there's no real record of this. It's likely they were told by women to children in their interior rooms. The story could be a negative story, they could be presented as a, "Watch out! Women will get round you, do things to you, weave you in their toils." It could be buried in it an old cautionary story about women and their wiles.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.

I love storytelling. If you strip all the bits away, what you'll find at the center is a storyteller. As I warm to my career and love it more, I have a sense that storytelling is healing, in many ways. You can reach an audience and heal, and by heal, I mean entertain and provoke. It's a wonderful life.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

I'm an old storyteller. I tell the story. It's about the story.

The greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling.

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.

Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.

Stories are the most primitive and purest form of communication.

My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.