A Quote by Philip Pullman

Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.

Quote Topics

Beings Human Human Being Human Beings Important Important Thing Most Most Important Thing Stories The Most Important Thing Without World

Quote Author

Philip Pullman
British - Writer
Born: October 19, 1946

People’s stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them.

William Deresiewicz

The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this; we are the only creature that tells stories, and sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. Then there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation and family and clan and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.

Salman Rushdie

Telling stories and having them received is so important. That dialogue is everything. I tell my students all the time that what separates us as human beings is our ability to hold stories. Our narrative history. There is so much power in that. Storytelling is our human industry.

Kathi Appelt

It's a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again.

Alexis Wright

We are essentially in the business of telling stories. We would like to think that most of our stories are basically human stories with sports as a backdrop.

Bryant Gumbel

As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

Nic Pizzolatto

Collaboration to me is... my favorite collaboration in the theatre is the collaboration between the actors and the audience because it's just that thing that happens when the only thing left that is left on the human scale is that human beings come to look at other human beings act out stories.

John Benjamin Hickey

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Yann Martel

Human beings cannot live without stories.

Ann Douglas

First of all, tabloid stories are some of the richest and most important stories that we have. There's nothing wrong, per se, with tabloid stories.

Errol Morris

Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.

Yuval Noah Harari

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

Nic Pizzolatto

Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.

Andre Dubus

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.

John Marsden

I think that stories, and the telling of stories, are the foundations of human communication and understanding. If children all over the country are watching films, asking questions and telling their stories, then the world will eventually be a better place.