People have always told tales. Long before humanity learned to write and gradually became literate, everybody told tales to everybody else and everybody listened to everybody else's tales. Before long it became clear that some of the still illiterate storytellers told more and better tales than others, that is, they could make more people believe their lies.
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.
The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.
Maybe more than a teller, I am a story listener. I really enjoy listening to stories. I remember them and keep them in my mind. All of my films are a collection of small stories that have been told to me.
He who would tell divers tales must know how to vary the tune.
The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
It is the tale, not he who tells it.
I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died... or worse.
How easy it is to tell tales!
This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.
Gossip is essentially storytelling: storytelling about people whom we know.
The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.
I love telling stories, that's it. I love it. That's the word I would choose to describe what I love the most.
