Life Storytelling Quotes

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.

Our hiring is almost completely built around just going through someone's life story, and we look for moments when they had to make important decisions, and we go deep on those.

Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.

I'd do a song in the studio and it would explain everything I'm going through so perfectly that when I went home and I felt down I could listen to that to make me feel better. It's a documentation of my life. I think it's just important to put it out there.

I'm sometimes mystified by people who keep diaries. I never thought of my existence as being that important.

I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are tendered conscious.

It is important to know that what I do is not artistic. I am just a film-maker. I live how I live and I do what I do, which is recording moments of my life as I move ahead. And I do it because I am compelled to. Necessity, not artistry, is the true line you can follow in my life and work.

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.

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.

It's a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story.

I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.

Autobiography should be more stringent. It should adhere more to the standards of journalism - assuming that journalism has the truth. The memoir gives you more scope, is more poetic, and allows you to play around with your own life.

A film about my life? But I am not dead.

I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.

The sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.

Trans voices are really underrepresented, and trans stories are really underrepresented, and when they are presented, they're often reductive. I was interested in putting a trans person and a trans narrative on stage that didn't fall into cliché, that thought a bit more deeply about the experience of being trans, and how those issues tie into things that we all experience. How we tell the story of our lives, versus what might have actually happened, and how we communicate to our former selves. All of those questions were really interesting to me.

The whole process of telling my story to my ghostwriter was so intense, after all, because he would ask me questions that no journalist would ask me. Things like, 'How did it smell at your grandmother's house?'

From the time we open our eyes, we live in a Steadicam form, and the only editing is when we talk about our lives or remember things.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

I write about my life, choosing incidents that I think will be, for one reason or another, significant to people. Often because they may have experienced the same things.