Quotes About Narrative

There's no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.

In order for us to live comfortably with ourselves while living on unjust terms with others, we have to tell ourselves a story that makes us innocent.

I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.

narrative therapy says that who we are is largely a product of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. [...] In other words, our narratives about ourselves don't merely reflect who we are: they help produce who we are.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

To let the player play the story, tell his own story, and have that story be deep and meaningful?

It's important to remember that every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it's up to us to figure out how to get from one to the other.

Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.

I think there's a lot of people in their dingy boats in the middle of the ocean pining for the days of closed-ended narrative.

That odd idea that one person can go to a foreign part and in this rather odd voice describe it to the folks back home doesn't make much sense in the post-colonial world.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up.

We are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation, not story, is king.

Theater is great because you're able to tell a narrative arc without a break. I think it's more about the material and whether what we get offered is good.

I no longer take on everything offered. Instead, I go up for roles I like, things that I would enjoy watching, stories that I want to tell.

I choose not to be in front of the camera. Sometimes I do get offered parts, but I really like just making movies and telling stories.

There is a small industry out there called media training. It offers instruction on how to 'control a narrative,' to use that awful term. Most politicians are clients.

With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfilling to be able to offer a different side to them, to be able to have some kind of unique takeaway from the official narrative.

Cable television is such a part of our society now. Oftentimes, the shows are really good, and you're just like, 'Well, it's worth sitting through the sex and violence because the narrative is so great.'

We're poor black kids from Akron, Ohio. When you tell stories about people like us, sometimes it's going to be considered a social-impact story.

One of the problems with episodic television of any color is that everything has got to be okay at the end of the episode so it can start again next week.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.