Quotes About Narrative

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.

If you were to put me under one umbrella, call me a storyteller.

I think I would have been a hopeless spy. I love telling stories and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret.

I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.

I think there is a lot of technology that is finding its way into our storytelling - it's pretty unavoidable.

I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.

HBO churn out some unbelievable stuff. They really got me with things like 'Band of Brothers.' But you can't beat 'The Sopranos.'

I don't want to play myself up as a hero, because it would make me unbelievable. I'd rather settle for people thinking that I'm a bum, but digging my stories, than liking me and not being able to believe in my stories. That's one reason I've been hard on myself, because I want my stuff to be believable.

My mother has told so many times the unbelievable story of how, as a toddler, I would demand raw onions and eat them like apples, I think that, at this juncture, it is a story that just has to be believed.

We just assumed that Walter Cronkite was unbiased. In hindsight, it is clear that Walter Cronkite was biased and that he used feigned objectivity as the cudgel to change the American narrative from being a right of center one to being a left of center one.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

Despite failing to get bin Laden, the U.S. government and media portrayed the early Afghanistan war as a great victory.

Any story you write about war, or film you make about war, is bound to be political whether you like it or not.

For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

They don't want to feed an ISIS narrative that there is a religious war between Islam and the Christian West, plus genocide is carefully defined under international law.

A story is a wondrous invention.

Basically all the religions, sciences and powers of the world boil down to a simple truth. The Best Story Teller will win in the end!

Whoever won the war, would revise the history.

The actual truth has never written about any war, and this will be no exception.

People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.

I never liked telling war stories. Some men love to tell them. Hell, some men need to. They need to convince themselves that the war is over. But I'm not one of them.