Quotes About Narrative

Events at home, at work, in the street - these are the bases for a story.

Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.

When I go the cinema, unfortunately nowadays, especially with the big commercial films, the audience is spoon-fed through the entire experience and they don't have to do any work.

It's interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves - not so much to learn about me.

My face has changed with the years and has enough history in it to give audiences something to work with.

If you're gonna let the character be the story, you better set a tone that allows the actors to do the best work they can do.

You have to find your tone and work within that to make it as real so the audience can really engage in the story you're telling.

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

My only want and wish, really, was to tell a good story. I wanted to do good work, tell a good story, and give the character a voice. Those were my only expectations.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

Turn off the sound in a movie, and if you can tell what's going on, the movie should work.

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.

I think my life is a movie and your life reflects your work.

Often, I get the feeling that the story is really happening somewhere and all I'm doing is trying to work out the best way to tell it.

In storytelling, the audience actually wants to work for their meal, they just don't want to know that they're doing it.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

I've been told by people I respect that flashbacks only work if they have their own narrative, but they can't be part of the present narrative.

While I am a huge proponent of us as Africans telling our own stories and countering the negative stereotypes out there since no one else will, I am also cognizant of the power that the mainstream Western media still has on shaping perceptions of the continent.

I think Steve Bannon is much to-do about nothing. I think this is a guy who wants to create his own myth.

Steven Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.

I have always wanted to work with Steven R. Monroe, and when I read his script, I was blown away! I think 'Complacent' hits a nerve that people try so desperately to avoid, which is what I love about Steven's work.

Beyonce, Stevie Nicks, Ani DiFranco, Cardi B - Women tell awesome stories.

Good stories flow like honey. Bad stories stick in the craw. A bad story? One that cannot be absorbed on the first time of reading.