Quotes About Narrative

I don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam.

Everything I saw in Japan was a story to me.

There has never been a better raconteur than Jesus of Nazareth.

If the goal of an actor is to tell the best story ever, there's no higher story than Jesus Christ.

We have to tell our story at 'Ebony' and 'Jet' like no one else can. We have the authenticity; we have the believability. And I think that's what we have to own.

I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.

The mandate we have as Jews is for the story of the Exodus from Egypt to be retold every generation.

It's not the Jews that killed Christ. It was a political situation, and it was the Romans who killed Jesus. They put Jesus on the cross, not the Jews.

Joe and I always say that our guide through action is always story and character. We're always driving right at the character beats, or else the action beat doesn't work.

Me and my friends used to joke about the fact that you don't see a Black man on a horse.

I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.

Louis CK knows that just because a joke is using space as a resource instead of something to be crammed like a hamper, this doesn't mean a story isn't happening.

The shouting and opinion and jokes don't exist if there isn't first a story.

You have comedians who just do jokes, and they're called comics, not comedians. You have comedians that do bits - a person that has a lot of jokes that have a beginning, a middle and an end, but it's not a real story. And you have someone that does great stories, the one that blends those things together - that person is doing comedy.

Any time you can build jokes around a story that resonates on an emotional level, it is going to have a big impact.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.

I don't like long jokes. I like stories rather than setup punchlines.

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

A lot of historical writing has been characterized as ODTAA—"one damn thing after another"—without an effort to extract general rules or causal theories that can be applied in other circumstances.

Maybe that was how to heal. I told myself stories and learned that I could be made of the ones I chose to tell, not simply the ones that life had laid haphazardly around me.

A good historian is timeless although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.

History is fables agreed upon.