Top 40 Jonathan Gottschall Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

2. “If you want to burrow a message into a human mind. Work it into a story.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

3. “Bull riding is probably the most dangerous sport in the world in terms of head injuries.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

4. “The brain stays up all night telling stories while we sleep. We just call them dreams.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

5. “We are creatures of story, and the process of changing one mind or the whole world must begin with ‘Once upon a time.’”

— Jonathan Gottschall

6. “Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

7. “The average daydream is about fourteen seconds long and we have about two thousand of them per day. In other words, we spend about half of our waking hours – one-third of our lives on earth – spinning fantasies.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

8. “Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality. And like a flight simulator, the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

9. “We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

10. “We are a species addicted to a stories.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

11. “Part of why I was attracted to the idea of owning a gun was self-defense, and part of it was that I’ve been fascinated by guns since I was a little kid, and I want to play with them. It seems like a lot of fun.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

12. “Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

13. “If someone breaks into your home when you’re there – that is, they don’t wait to be sure that the house is empty – it’s a bad situation. Honor doesn’t come into it at all. Anything you need to do to survive at that point becomes A-OK.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

14. “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

15. “Literature offers feelings for which we don’t have to pay. It allows us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

16. “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.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

17. “Story is where people go to practice the key skills of human social life.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

18. “A boxing contest is a brain-damage contest. Who can give out more brain damage and who can absorb more of it?”

— Jonathan Gottschall

19. “Don’t despair for story’s future or turn curmudgeonly over the rise of video games or reality TV. The way we experience story will evolve, but as storytelling animals, we will no more give it up than start walking on all fours.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

20. “Story – sacred and profane – is perhaps the main cohering force in human life. A society is composed of fractious people with different personalities, goals, and agendas. What connects us beyond our kinship ties? Story. As John Gardner puts it, fiction “is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.” Story is the counterforce to social disorder, the tendency of things to fall apart. Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

21. “Getting punched in the face with a padded glove doesn’t really hurt your face. It doesn’t hurt your skull. The only thing it hurts is your brain. You can feel the brain injury happening. It’s an instant headache.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

22. “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.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

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

— Jonathan Gottschall

24. “I watch fights and I often feel morally compromised by it. I feel like I’m morally culpable for what’s occurring because I’m the spectator and ultimately footing the bill for the spectacle.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

25. “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.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

26. “I’m living in the heart of gun culture, but I’m not a gun guy. I didn’t grow up with them; I was never a hunter; my dad was never a hunter.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

27. “When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

28. “Studies show that when ordinary people do something wrong – break a promise, commit a murder – they usually fold it into a narrative that denies or at least diminishes their guilt.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

29. “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.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

30. “Yes, experimental fictions like Finnegans Wake are still in print, but they are mainly sold either to cultured autodidacts dutifully grinding their way through the literary canon, or to college students who are forced to pretend that they have read them.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

31. “The world is spinning down a post-truth vortex of media bubbles, fake news, and feral confirmation bias.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

32. “I think what bothers us about fighting sports isn’t the damage to the athlete but the fact that you win by doing more harm to your opponent than he does to you. It just seems ugly.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

33. “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.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

34. “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.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

35. “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.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

36. “When you spar in boxing, the only thing that gets hurt is your brain. Everything else feels pretty good.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

37. “Story is more akin to the lines on your palm. No matter what your fortuneteller claims, the lines are not maps of your future. They are side effects of the flexion of the hand.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

38. “Why do stories cluster around a few big themes, and why do they hew so closely to problem structure? Why are stories this way instead of all the other ways they could be? I think that problem structure reveals a major function of storytelling. It suggests that the human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

39. “I don’t think people are reacting primarily to the danger of the sport. There are many other activities that are truly dangerous that we have no inclination to ban.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

40. “My reason for arguing against abolishing these types of sports isn’t some kind of lofty, philosophical rationale. It’s just that I did it and I liked it. It comes down to a libertarian issue for me. I feel that if I know the risks and I want to take them, I should be allowed to do so.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

41. “Bad people,” in the main, are simply those who had the misfortune first to encounter, and then to believe, the wrong storytellers.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

42. “I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd is right to wonder if overconsuming in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a “mental diabetes epidemic.”

— Jonathan Gottschall