Quotes About Narrative

What you would call a 'lead,' I've always considered a supporting part, and what people would call 'supporting parts,' I've considered leads. In a way, I look at it in reverse, because supporting parts - when they're done correctly - are the ones that are progenitors for storylines, to move forward.

It's very important that all the supporting characters feel like they've existed in the world, that they've had a history, and they'll go on to have a history within the scope of the story rather than just popping up and then disappearing.

With storytelling, you have to see yourself as the hero in the movie of your own life, and I kind of see myself as a supporting role, a walk-on role that has five lines. I say, 'Mr. President, the Russians are here.' That's how I see myself.

When you're working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum.

Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling.

I guess you can stay sort of true to the story; you don't have to artificially bring the character back from whatever doom you've designed for them, you can tell the story, I suppose, honestly.

I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.

It's often said that everybody has a story to tell, and I suppose that's true, but the problem is that most of them aren't worth telling.

It's hard to say how certain stories just punch us in the heart and the brain at the same time at the end. I suppose that's what we're all looking for. But each story has its own valence, its own way of saying goodbye to you.

Most of us live in a fog. It's like life is a movie we arrived to 20 minutes late. You know something important seems to be going on. But we can't figure out the story. We don't know what part we're supposed to play or what the plot is.

I can't say that the ending of a story is always the best part of the story, and yet there's sort of this implicit idea that the finale is somehow supposed to be the mind-blowing best episode of a show. The question is: Why is that? Why do people make that assumption?

I think, in history, we often see a false representation of women. The men are always the successors and, supposedly, of their own merit, which I don't believe to be to true.

I made 'Supreme Clientele' what it is. Those are my stories, based around whatever they're based upon. It's me.

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.

Even 'Piku' was quite an experiment in terms of storytelling because on the surface nothing happens in the film. If you ask me what was the film about, it was about father-daughter fighting and the narrative captured their daily life.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

On the sequel, you've lost the element of surprise. Usually, on the first one you may not go very, very deep into character; the second one you start to explore the character a bit more.

Every so often, you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can't let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer's room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.

An important part of any good mystery story like 'Original Sin' is that it's not just a game of 'Clue' with surprise after surprise after surprise, but the goal is to tell a story in the midst of that. Even once you know the solution to the mysteries, it's far from the whole story.

What was so lovely about 'O.J.' and 'This Is Us' to a certain extent is that I got a chance to surprise people.

We get excited by ideas, and we're more excited by being surprised by ideas than we are in dictating the course of events. We've found that leads to more interesting storytelling.

When I started publishing my work, one of the biggest surprises to me was the recurring question about my background and why I wasn't doing more stories about Asian-Americans.