Quotes About Narrative

The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out.

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.

We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.

The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn't exactly false, either.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.

I think to many people the term 'activist film' implies a film with a single point of view - something designed to provoke outrage and urge action on a particular issue - sort of the film equivalent of a rally. 'If a Tree Falls' is not that kind of film.

But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.

It's urgent that companies tell their own stories on digital platforms.

When you play guest parts, you play your story in a very urgent kind of way.

Of course on air I use occasional hyperbole to tell a story.

Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events. But now there are no big stories, and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.

Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don't use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.

Everything a director does must help the story and the performances. Otherwise, it is useless.

The best leaders... almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.

Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

As an activist who uses storytelling to combat stigma, I have always been adamant that we tell our own stories.

So many of the recipes that I come up with have a story. I'm a blogger. It flowed very naturally out of me, but I also knew this was a way to set my recipes apart. A, they are always using interesting ingredients but B, there is always a story behind it.

For me, it's always about using my platform to give people an alternative narrative, because we all need to upgrade our mindsets.