Quotes About Storytelling

I always wanted my kids to like me and think I was funny, so I made up this story about a kid named Jake and his racecar that he had built from scratch, fully loaded with whatever fantastical gadget he or I wanted him to have at the moment. I loved making up the stories off the top of my head.

We are all at the center of our own narrative, but it's a narrative that changes every time we retell it.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

I hear music as narrative.

Roles don't fascinate me. It is the narrative, the screenplay that is fascinating.

If I have a collection of songs for an EP or mixtape, I create the narrative afterwards; but usually with an album, I have a concept and the name first.

I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

Most of my films have been documentaries, but I'm also very interested in narrative filmmaking.

I used my instincts. It's very easy to imagine how you'd feel, actually. I just had to tell the narrative.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.

Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.

Strong female characters - even if they don't necessarily make the same decisions that we might - make such great narrative material, especially when there's an equally strong male character in the mix.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, 'You've learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what's the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?'

I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.

One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.

The kinds of games I'm most interested in are narrative games.

I'm looking for a charismatic character - somebody who you just want to look at and listen to and whom the camera likes. I'm also looking for a narrative arc: Something is going to happen, and there will be a question that will make you wonder what happens at the end.

Each country has its own way of communicating a narrative and, through that, expressing family experiences in emotional stories.

The most serious problem doing biography is the matter of time because you have to shape events into a narrative of two hours; you have to create a dramatic arc. That can be a challenge.

We are in this amazing age of television where there's an incredible amount and an incredible quality of television, of long-form narrative.

If you need to fudge the facts a little bit to make your narrative work, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you.

Personal narrative is one of the few things where people don't get caught up in fighting over esoteric rhetoric.