Russell Hoban Quotes

I mean, he was something that happened to me, you know? But before he was this minor figure in the drama of my life he was - you know, the central figure in the drama of his own life.

The narrative of our lives is a total construct. We get to choose what that is. That is something I've realized as I've gotten older. I have a lot of choices about the story that I'm telling myself about my life. So where do I find meaning?

Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

People write memoirs - this is my take, anyway - out of a great sense of self-importance.

Who you are moment to moment is just a story.

Are you a minor character in my tale, or am I a lesser figure in yours?

There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

Every hero is the villain of his own story.

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

Every time I change the way I explain myself to myself, I have to rearrange the story of my life.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.

Think of every character as a main character. They believe they're the main characters in their stories. No one should just be an obstacle.

each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.

With the story of your life, you dont get to write the whole book, just your character.

For the collection, I am like a painter or a writer. I may or may not be a character in my own story.

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.

There is no truth except the truth that exists within you. Everything else is what someone is telling you.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he finds himself! not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in him alone belief gives itself being and reality