Saturday, May 26, 2012
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What is that quote about there being only a certain number of original stories?

I half remember a quote about there only being (I want to say 12, but that sounds like too many) original stories in the world and that the rest are the same stories told in a slightly different way. Does anyone know what the quote is, and who it was said by?


5 Comments

  1. I don’t know but I’m curious.

  2. Borges said in “Los cuatro ciclos”: “Four are the stories. During the time left to us, we’ll keep telling them, transformed”. It appeared in his collection “The Gold of the Tigers”.

  3. Well there are actually different people with different numbers of story lines.

    Foster-Harris. “The Basic Patterns of Plot”
    Says 3

    Booker, Christopher “Seven Basic Plots”
    Says 7

    Tobias, Ronald B. “20 Master Plots”
    Says 20

    Polti, Georges. “The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations”.
    Says 36

    And I say there are 42.

  4. Even Shakespeare had to recycle old stories.

    However, what I heard is that there are only SEVEN original jokes and anything is merely one or more combinations of these.

  5. no specific number tell how much ever you wnat to, and you can always prove it right!!!everybody has a different conception about it