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We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.

Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They're devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.

The telling of stories creates the real world.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

The stories we can tell are those that happen to us; we meet, work, live, laugh, love, demonstrate, strive in community.

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. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.