Quotes About Narrative

In every debate, whatever the format, whatever the questions, there is one and only one way to identify the winner: Who commands the room? Who drives the narrative? Who is in charge?

History is not just written by the winners; it's written about them.

History is written by the winners. My job as an artist is to speak up for those who might be perceived as the losers. Or those who can't shout.

Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.

Nobody gives a damn about the Merrimac. You know how it is. Winners write the history books.

There was a time when history was written by a few people, the winners. Now, history is written by all of us all the time... That's the thing we keep telling our 14-year-olds, you know: anything you do right now, it's not going anywhere.

We often know only one version of the story... the version portrayed by the person who wins a war and lives to tell the tale, and the one who loses a war is always remembered as the 'Antagonist' making the victor the 'Protagonist.'

People in my town were not that into reading, but the overblown way Texans told stories was important.

How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.

Comics don't work if the story is all in the text and the images are illustrative. It's hard to have enough faith in the artists to allow them to do their job.

Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.

Progressives control America's schools and text book industry and they dishonestly leave the ugliest parts of the collectivist story out.

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Young people are constantly absorbing - through media, textbooks, and policy - the myths of American exceptionalism; for black children, this means that what they are taught in class does not match the world that they navigate daily.

Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.

The only books I give up on are texts where the writer's attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.

A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

I actually thank God for television... it's not technology, it's storytelling. Technology is saying, 'Do less, do less, do less.' And I don't think it's healthy, no.

I'm a storyteller. I'm always willing to serve the story, a story I believe in, in whatever way is necessary. If I need to write the story I believe in, I will write it. If I've been offered to act in a story that I truly believe in, I will happily do that, but I'm a storyteller. That's something I'm so thankful for.

Yes, there is a way I was taught to think that's very suited to writing. And, of course, I'm thankful to have grown up in a world filled with stories.

I am thankful to those who've listened to my story over and over as well as those who've helped me share it. For me, the act of storytelling is an act of healing.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.