Quotes About Narratives

Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

Dates were like deep friendships filmed in timelapse, one-night stands were like express-courtships from courtship to dissolution... When I'd entered my last relationship at twenty, we'd all been new and shiny. Now I was meeting people who had... stories.

Wirklichkeit besteht aus miteinander geteilten Geschichten.

Instead of putting people in boxes, we need to stop and listen to their stories.

Bücher sind ja, irgndwie, MenschnReste -

Boxing distills and illuminates the essence of an athlete. There's nowhere to hide. Boxers live and perform at the extremes. They provide us with answers about a given contest, but more important, they ask us fundamental questions about human narratives. What does this person really stand for? How far will he go to defend it?

I don't see a lot of narratives written where a woman who looks like me gets to be beautiful and sexualized and upwardly mobile, middle-class, funny, quirky. They're very seldom written.

The U.S. is a rainbow of people with an endless scope of stories. My hope is that writing stories about people of color will become instinctual rather than something to be pushed for.

I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them.

For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

My goal is to broaden and deepen the range of African-American characters on television, so I always try to show human beings.

Everyone I talk to has a Genesis story to tell.

Far too often, I read a script where the girls are the girlfriend or the set dressing.

I have always believed that more stories of women in leadership roles need to be told and I am glad I could be a part of one such story.

The whole Christmas story was probably a later addition to the gospel narratives, presented only by the authors of Matthew and Luke. Mark and John seem never to have heard of the manger in Bethlehem, the Massacre of the Innocents, the hovering star, the three wise men, and so forth.

The religious imagery and fairytales that formed our shared cultural references have been replaced by the cult of celebrity. Marilyn is the sex goddess, Camilla Parker Bowles is cast as the wicked witch, Che Guevara is the revolutionary. Celebrities have become visual shorthand for narratives that shape our lives.

For 'Portillo's Hidden History of Britain,' I arranged to meet men and women who were witnesses to history - ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

Here is an entirely banal idea that I think has the potential to change the world: Take evidence seriously. Taking evidence seriously does not mean privileging numbers over all other forms of knowledge - theories, narratives, images. Nor does it mean the kind of radical skepticism that questions everything to the point where no action is possible.

To figure out what people think, look at the stories that they tell. We might never get away from the image of Sheldon from 'The Big Bang Theory' breaking down in the middle of the store, not knowing which console to buy, but we can see in TV and movies how regular characters are more and more starting to play games.

I enjoy stories about thin women - I read them frequently. I enjoy them; I root for those characters, but I always feel like there are enough of them out there and there are enough of them in the spotlight.

In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives.

It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite.

Heirlooms we don't have in our family. But stories we've got.