As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.
I don't travel and tell stories, because that's not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.
My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.
Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.
The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'
Myth is, after all, the neverending story.
They say a story loses something with each telling.
Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.
Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she's also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stories. There's a parade in The Arabian Nights of sorceresses, adulteresses, ghouls, sirens, harridans.
If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.
I want to tell you a story. I have no other vanity.
I was hugely formed by stories I was told as a child whether that was in a book, the cinema, theatre or television and probably television more than any medium is what influenced me as a child and formed my response to literature, story-telling and, therefore, the world around me.
The blues is nothing but a story... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .
Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales.
I loved Westerns for different reasons as an adult. It is not only our only native brand of storytelling - the only one that's not influenced by Europeans and not something that's done better by the French - but I also love the sensuality of the Western. The sights, sounds, and smell of a Western are very exciting.
Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you.
I've spoken before on how the art of storytelling has been lost a bit. I definitely feel 'Empire' is helping to reprogram us back to that place where we pay attention and invest emotionally in the records and the artists.
Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and attitudes, the stance they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.
I'm Welsh. We didn't do 'Peter Pan.' We have far more ancient legends to be put to sleep with.
I have a daughter, Hanna, and I never read fairy tales to her. But I did tell her bedtime tales and made up many tales involving 'Gory the Goblin' and other creatures that I borrowed from the Grimms' tales and other tales I knew.
Any narrative, whether it's fiction or not, you have to approach it as though it really happened to you. I think that's the only way to get inside the characters and make the narrative work. It's a storytelling tradition, and I think to come off as genuine then you have to really approach it that way.
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.
All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . .
