Quotes About Narrative

Lots of times when I'm offered things, I can't see how a story gets filmed. Either it's too internal or it doesn't have a strong spine.

The innovators' spirit of America still exists. However, there is a narrative in America which goes like - you must go to MIT to get your calling card. Or you go to Harvard and then you drop out and then you've made it.

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.

Secular writers can tell a story about the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual parts of a character. But no matter how well they tell the story, they miss a facet that is innately part of all of us - the spiritual.

I'm interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion.

American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

People think I left The Band and spoiled this whole thing, and that's not what happened. Nobody broke up The Band. Nobody ever said, 'That's it, we're done.'

Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had.

I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone who's told me that the story of 'Roots' isn't important.

The roles I used to be cast for were typically objectified women, so I was always being shown or spoken about through the lens of the guy.

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

Good luck in a way is bad luck not occurring, but the world wants stories of how bad luck happened, and how good luck played a savior.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

I prefer to speak of 'interdimensionals' rather than 'extraterrestrials' because the latter has connotations of 'little green men' and all the other cliché responses. Nor does it tell the full story.

Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.

On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

History -- its what those bitter old men write.

I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.

Every man is the author of his own life.

The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books.

The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.