Quotes About Narrative

I like to do things that are about relationships, work with quality people, and tell a different kind of story.

I'm trying to tell history with a capital H through histories with a small h. It moves people, because you know in your own personal relationships, your own story, there's an echo to a much larger reality.

If I had to choose between a relative and a good story, I would take the story.

It's amazing how much the sense of telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end helps me to relax. I find that the mass of stories that one is subjected to living one's life is otherwise overwhelming.

I think one of the things that happens with, especially in the criminal justice system, is that the prosecutor is able to control the narrative from the very, very beginning. The moment an arrest is made, they put out a press release to the media and the media follows that narrative.

All I want to achieve is to present the unreported history of Kashmiri Hindus.

I remember feeling guilty that I had a good childhood. I thought everybody who is famous has to have a desperate childhood and work his way out of it, but I had a great one.

If I hadn't told stories, I would've been a historian.

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.

I would like people to get a differentiated historical view of Germany.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

That great dust-heap called 'history'.

In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

It begins with the kind of story the writers want to tell. We never sit around in those retreats and say, 'We really need to make a change. Let's change this character.' Or throw a dart at the wall and see what hits. It all begins with story.

I work with gold that holds our past and diamonds that see the future and rubies that long for love. It's just a way of telling a story.

When I do actual sequential work, I really want a story I can get a behind: a story that really holds my attention for, like, the length of what I'll be working on.

The Holocaust story has been told and retold so many times.

Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.

When I did 'Boyz N The Hood', I never thought how we grew up in South Central was interesting enough for a movie.