41 Quotes by Jonathan Gottschall

The idea that stories slavishly obey deep structural patterns seems at first vaguely depressing. But it shouldn’t be. Think of the human face. The fact that all faces are very much alike doesn’t make the face boring or mean that particular faces can’t startle us with their beauty or distinctiveness.

I think the proper attitude toward fighting sports is one of ambivalence. You can be drawn to them, but you should also be repelled by them.

Most people think of fiction as a wildly creative art form. But this just shows how much creativity is possible inside a prison.

Memories are often pruned and shaped by an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

I think that a lot of people who like training with guns are probably drawn to it not only for practical reasons, but also in that same restless quest for physical excellence that draws people to a martial arts dojo.

Lord! When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book, in a real book I mean. – CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, Parnassus on Wheels.

We are a species addicted to a stories.

There is a paradox in fiction that was first noticed by Aristotle in the Poetics. We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety, Sturm und Drang.

At my local big-box bookstore, the gun nut, muscle head, and martial arts magazines are all shelved together in what I call the “masculine anxiety” section.