Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

I'm interested in stories. I think I'm a bit of a pathfinder.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived.

To begin with, I want to tell a good story, a story that people will listen to and that they'll think this is true, even if it is a story that might be defined as - as myth or legend or even fanciful.

There has always been this narrator in me - I loved ideas, and part of the great love affair I would have with ideas consisted of talking about them.

I tell stories. That's what I do. I've always told stories.

I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.

I've never turned into a bee - I've never been chased by a mummy or met a ghost. But many of the ideas in my books are suggested by real life.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

I believe that hunger for a 'lost dimension' of experience is a natural yearning in all of us, and it doesn't go away just because we ignore it. It is evidenced among other places in the millions of children and adults who obsessively read the 'Harry Potter' books. It is said that fiction is where someone gets to tell the truth.

First and foremost, you want to be truthful as a storyteller.

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

The specious figments of genius, and the erratic flights of philosophy, may excite our wonder, but they cannot stand the ordeal of scrutiny, or the Lydian touch of experiment.

I am a storyteller, and the stories I tell are, when I'm lucky, really good ones. It's a very exciting thing to do with your life, and that's, I think, what keeps me hopeful.

I always love novels that open up a subject to me - like raising a window to a beautiful, mysterious world outside.

I feel like I'm a professional storyteller, really. A lot of people say 'a truth teller,' and, if the writing supports it, that's what your aim is: to try and present people with a series of truths, and then they can make up their mind about those and whether they have any real credence or weight.

Life writes the best stories.

That's my favourite stuff to write about: my journeys and the people I meet - especially the kids.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not." "Shouldn't the storyteller believe it." "The storyteller should tell it.

I am a storyteller, and I do love ideas.

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.