Quotes About Narrative

I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

You can't help but reveal your bias, and you can't but invest personally in any story that you tell.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

People love storylines. They love them because at some point, the talent will get people emotionally invested.

But I can say what interests me about documentary is the fact that you don't know how the story ends at the onset - that you are investigating, with a camera, and the story emerges as you go along.

Everyone is happy for the history of slavery to be investigated so long as the investigation examines the parts in which we look good.

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

I've always believed that the stories and the performances are more important than I am. I think that the more invisible that my hand is, the more attention people can pay to the story and to those performances.

When a character bears the same name as the author it's just an invitation to have some fun.

I write to tell my grandchildren where they come from, and what their grandparents were up to, and I hope they will in their own way continue. I invite anyone else to listen in.

Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.

It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.

I go out and look for a good story to tell and if I like it enough and I decide to direct it, I become dangerously involved in becoming a part of that story.

I think any story line that involves a relationship is going to be interesting.

I'm an actor, and my main purpose is to bring out interesting stories to life. If it involves a cause that I can be a part of, I most definitely will.

TV writing is different than other mediums, involving the writer.

There have been so few decent films involving Negroes that right away everybody expects every film to do everything. But when you make a flick, there are maybe two things you're trying to put into that flick. You can put the other things in another time.

You used to need a big camera to direct, but now, anyone with an iPhone can tell a story visually. You can film something. You can start off with a five-minute story, then a 10-minute story.

I took my Canadian perspective over to Ireland and dug around, and I found a very interesting story and brought it back.

That's what the holidays are for - for one person to tell the stories and another to dispute them. Isn't that the Irish way?

My idea is to write a story where every character is well etched out, irrespective of their gender. Because they all are human beings and stories are on the situation and human mind.