Meaningful Narratives Quotes

It's people stories that make good reading. I don't feel like I'm a sportswriter. I feel like I'm a guy who writes about people who happen to do sports. The best columns are the ones where you tie it somehow into the fabric of the country.

There are so few stories being produced that are human. I suffer with the loss of that. I feel kind of out of place, even though I've continued to work.

The goal in blogging/ business/ inspiring non-fiction is to share a truth, or at least a truth as the writer sees it. To not just share it, but to spread it and to cause change to happen. You can do that in at least three ways: with research (your own or reporting on others), by building and describing conceptual structures, or with stories that resonate.

Acting and making art is just something I love to do, and I love to tell stories that feel important, honest and necessary. It's not about me. It's about being part of something.

The richest most meaningful stories are found in small places: made, carried, crafted, told, and retold by apparently unimportant people.

The only way I can feel comfortable being an actor is if I can find stories that I believe are important to be shared.

I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all.

Be the leads of big films that are entertaining and maybe then cross over to stuff that moves people and has a little bit more texture to it.

Call it egotistical or narcissist, but I think that's what we all look for in books - the right stories that help us make sense of the world that we, on a very personal level, live in every day.

There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.

Sometimes you can't really control the language around you. All you can do is follow your voice and your path - dedicate yourself to stories that matter.

What I'm passionate about is telling stories which mean something to me.

I love to read things that have moral messages, and I love to hear stories where it's not just a hook, you have to follow the story, you have to listen to the message of the song, and get it and use it in your everyday life.

Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.

Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean.

So that, to me, is important that audiences are treated with an amount of respect toward their intelligence. Most Hollywood films don't respect their intelligence.

It's probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell. If you're going to spend two years of your life on something it has to matter to you, you have to be passionate about it.

In any culture, if information is to maximise in a contextual space, and new meanings be born, the original story has to have substance - there's gotta be gold in them thar hills.