Quotes About Narrative

Lebanon is not only burning buildings and people crying in the street. When you say 'Lebanon,' especially to foreigners, that's the first thing they think of.

For me, the first thing is to tell a good story.

For me, the easiest thing to figure out is the story I want to tell, and the hardest thing is to figure out the voice that's gonna tell it. And that's why I finish very little.

The hardest thing is to write about people. First and foremost, you have to encounter their humanity. That is the only way you can make them live as characters on the page.

I think repetition is the hardest thing to avoid with sequels, because you've told a story and now you're adding more story to the story.

The pro-life movement is and has been led by women for decades. The history of the movement shows this, despite the current narrative about men 'controlling' or making laws about women's bodies.

The history of cinema appears to be easy to do, since it is, after all, made up of images; cinema appears to be the only medium where all one has to do is re-project these images so that one can see what has happened.

If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.

The scope of the history of women is so underplayed and not told as often as it should be.

The way Americans most understand the history of Latinos in this country, a lot of it is being told now through the lens of what's happening with the immigration debate. While that's an important debate that has security and moral implications, in my view, there's also a huge history of Latinos in the United States that's never been told.

Nobody really knows for sure how the Boxer Rebellion started. It began among the poor, and the history of the poor is rarely written down.

It's a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was 'real' religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that's why it's completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices.

My grandfather was originally from the south of China before he emigrated to Malaysia pre-World War II. And I wanted to learn more about the history of the country of my ancestors. I knew I wanted a narrative set in contemporary Beijing. I was really interested in the effect of the rapid social and economic change on ordinary citizens in China.

I can't take on the history of 50 percent of the population just because I'm a woman.

We do documentaries on the history of cinema in between our feature films.

I believe there's no such thing as history; there's only historians, and in English, we've got this word 'his'tory, but what about her story? So that, in the end, the history of the world would be a history of every single one of its members, but of course, you could never get to grips with that.

All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.

The leading character isn't always the most important or interesting character; when people think that the protagonist is the character portrayed, it's people who haven't read Shakespeare.

The most important thing is story-telling. It's as singular and old-fashioned as that.

The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character.

The one thing that makes writing a better pastime than reading is that you can make things turn out the way you want in the end!

Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

That's the problem with soaps, of course. The stories never end. They can go on and on and on.