Quotes About Narrative

Tell the fucking story.

oral history is ultimately ... a document that we do not find but rather cocreate inside the interview

The interview is two things at once: a tool for research, and the opening of a narrative space.

The interview is not a question-and-answer session, but the offer of a narrative possibility

An interview, then, is a moment in a relationship between times: the time of the events, the time of the telling, and, when we factor in the archive, the time of listening.

The interview gives us access not to the experience but to a verbal rendition of the memory of that experience, generated by the presence of the interviewer.

Quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.

Somethings were meant to be and somethings were just meant to be good stories

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

some things were just meant to be good stories

Then quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.

have to be alive to tell the tale.

They were among the leaders of what I had begun to think of as "Team Apocalypse," the media outlets that – for reasons I could not fully understand – seemed committed to painting as bleak a picture of the coronavirus as possible.

We are all immigrants, a glorious confection of races and beliefs, united by the rock that we live on. As the years wash over us and new generations march into the future, family histories are subsumed into the greater narrative. We become, simply, Americans.

So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.

Histories of music since 1900 often take the form of a teleological tale, a goal-obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward and heroic battles with the philistine bourgeoisie. When the concept of progress assumes exaggerated importance, many works are struck from the historical record on the grounds that they have nothing new to say.

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do - I think it is even what fiction is for.

Stories about the most difficult things need to provide catharsis, or the reader will stop reading, or go mad.

What would you read to someone who was dying?" Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?

History is the autobiography of a madman.

Diaries are terrible liars. They record dramas out of context, encourage paranoia, rearrange facts, are deliberately biased and self-justifying, blind you with irrelevance, censor alternative opinion, exaggerate petty complaints into tragic emblems and, in particular, wallow in the fact that any fool can write about dejection, but describing happiness takes determination and skill. Most diaries are moans in writing, even when the person writing them is happy.

The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular.