Narrative Exhaustion Quotes

I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives.

One of the reasons I wanted to write a memoir was because I'm tired of telling my story. [Laughs] So I can say, here, read it, this is everything that happened. There are a bunch of cool stories of the transition of me becoming a receiver from a quarterback in college to being a special teams guy, a role player, to working my way to the role I've earned now.

Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.

When you do a lot of interviews, you find yourself telling the same stories over and over. After you do it for a whole day, you say, 'Christ, I've said this five times today.' It gets fun when you get so bored you start making it all up.

I can't imagine something worse than scripts being written into a tunnel, thinking, 'I don't know when this ends. I don't know.' It usually ends when people get sick of it, but I think it's great when it gets to end on its own terms.

You want a story? Read 'Gone With the Wind'. These aren't stories. They're joke books. The whole thing of a beginning, a middle and an end has been done to death.

Some stories, she’d say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.

That's one of the reasons why 'Lost' has to end: because we can't sit around and envision, 'What is the flashback for Jack in year nine?' It doesn't realistically exist.

I do live with the very real possibility that we don't have endless stories to tell.