That's why most people turn to storytelling, is to escape.

Most African stories these days, they talk about famine,

Most African stories these days, they talk about famine, HIV and AIDS, poverty or war.

And I heard stories that shattered all the other stories.

What stories?

The stories that we want to know, and the stories that do exist about positive tales.

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories.

I love comic books.

Stories are the key.

People like stories.

We all love stories.

We bring stories to the public.

We love stories.

They are the same stories.

I like the ballads.

The villagers make up stories!

They're stories.

Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.

Jonathan Harris collects stories

I have some stories that are humorous,

But the result is always to have stories.

I just tell the stories.

What, you tell me a bunch of stories and what?

So a few of the stories.

Stories cut across all boundaries,

The best stories infuse wonder.

We tell ourselves stories.

Many stories matter.

We're all familiar with historical stories.

And the stories I've heard...

He wrote some books.

He loves making up stories.

In fact, I've heard a lot of stories in my time.

The old storyteller.

Look, you shouldn't believe all that banana oil...

There are many such stories.

That's enough of those stories.

The thing about stories, though, in most of the existing mediums that we're accustomed to things like novels, radio, photographs, movies, even lectures like this one we're very accustomed to this idea of the narrator or the camera position, some kind of omniscient, external body through whose eyes you see the story.

I exist because there are stories, and if there are no stories, we don't exist.

But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me.

Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

There are billions of stories like Dulu Bibi s and billions of other stories that demand our attention.

And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up.

There was a problem with these stories, however, which I later discovered, which is that half of them weren't true.

I'm here today and what I want to talk about is stories and the importance of stories to me and I think the importance of stories to everybody.