Maria Popova quotes from a lecture by author Neil Gaiman on what makes stories last. Gaiman argues that the best stories can live for millennia: "Do stories grow? Pretty obviously — anybody who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one person to another knows that they can grow, they can change. Can stories reproduce? Well, yes. Not spontaneously, obviously — they tend to need people as vectors. We are the media in which they reproduce; we are their petri dishes."
September 27, 2015
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