Quotes About Narrative

Every person has a story and is a story in the making.

I met Elvis in your woods one night," Terry said. One of the EMTs had given him a shot, and I thought it was beginning to work. "I knew I was nuts then. He was telling me how much he liked cats. I told him I was a dog person, myself.

We know this story isn't true, but it is truth.

Very seldom in my fiction have I directly used the stories people have told me. I think ripping off people's lives in fiction is dangerous. It also lacks imagination.

I want to do stuff like 'Lady Bird.' I want people to say, 'She told amazing stories.'

I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.

I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.

If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.

'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.

Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.

Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.

'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.

Part of the thing about why I wrote memoirs rather than a novel is that if anybody is going to tell my story it is going to be me in my way.

Every movie has three things you have to do - you have to have a compelling story that keeps people on the edge of their seats; you have to populate that story with memorable and appealing characters; and you have to put that story and those characters in a believable world. Those three things are so vitally important.

Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

Memory narrativises itself.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

Getting to have an opportunity to tell a story that is about mental illness and how it affects one's self and one's community was really something that really meant a lot to me.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

It's true that films are made on mere calculations such as fight and item song. If the audience is lucky enough, there will be some story.

Just wearing expensive and glamorous clothes do not merit for me to do a film. There has to be a good story and a good role.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.