From wikipedia’s entry on storytelling…

“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens–second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.”

And that in turn is from A Palpable God: Thirty Stories Translated from the Bible With an Essay on the Origins and Life of Narrative, (1997) by Reynolds Price