Quotes About Narrative

Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.

Movie-making is telling a story with the best technology at your disposal.

People need foundation myths.

Everything, as Peyman said, may be a fiction – but the Future is the biggest shaggy-dog story of all.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

God made man because he loves to hear stories, Alessandro said. That's a good story, huh?

It's the responsibility of the survivor to tell the story.

I tell you I'm tired of hearing it. There ain't nothing that happens to a person that ain't that person. The world out there only does what you tell it to do. The world is happening to you the way it is happening because you're telling yourself the story that way. If you want to change the world so damn bad, Ida, then where you got to start is how it is you're looking at it.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.

Walking through a town can be like flicking through a picture book.

There is no such thing as nonfiction.

The slaves themselves were powerless to create any written record of what they witnessed, or to publicize it in any way beyond the discreet oral circles of plantation life. What can be known of Sharpe's method and motives must be seen through the lens of the Jamaican prosecutorial narrative, which sought to understand him only to the point of gathering sufficient evidence to justify his hanging.

My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you're not strictly bound to a linear narrative.

I want to make movies about my country from my point of view.

As a certain philosopher of ancient Greece once put it, the difference between the historian and poet/storyteller is that where the historian relates what happened, the storyteller tells us how it might have come about.

So I deal in straight-up fiction myself, cause I value my family and friends, and mostly cause I lie a lot anyway.

Since you're the hero of your own story, I know you'll come up with a good ending.

The historian's task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.

The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism ' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.

Mitt liv har inte varit en roman, utan en novellsamling

I don't mind a dirty girl. But what I find tragic is when we, as women, become not the subject of our own story but someone else's object.

We don't often see our own stories. Good artists are the ones that whisper our own stories back to us.

That's strange, Grandmother thought. I can't describe things any more. I can't find the words, or maybe it's just that I'm not trying hard enough. It was such a long time ago. No one here was even born. And unless I tell it because I want to, it's as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it's lost.

Quite, quite,' she thought with a little sigh. 'It's always like this in their adventures. To save and be saved. I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterward.