Narrative Influence Quotes

When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.

We think in myths; we live in myths

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

Culture and technology exist in a dynamic reciprocal relationship. Culture comprehends technology through the means of narratives or myths, and those narratives influence the future shape and purposes of technology. The culture-technology circuit is at the heart of cultural evolution.

Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

If you can tell a story well, you can move people to do something.

You are the effect of your story, that's all.

The point of what I do is that it doesn't really matter what a book or a story is as long it moves you, informs you, challenges you, entertains you, or changes you.

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

The narratives in which you're born have a fierce pattern of repetition.

As the years have gone on and you start to know your character better than some of the writers and directors do, you get a little bit more of a world in which you can say, "I think it would be really great, if this year, her fate wasn't determined by the boys," or that kind of thing. You have to pick your battles and make sure that you've earned the right to talk about that.

As a film composer I deal with short bursts of musical ideas that are defined to a large extent by what's happening on the screen, by not only narrative and action, but staying out of the way of dialogue, sound effects.

The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.

The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is.

The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

the novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important.

I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live.

Sometimes I have songs born out of stories.

In this mob of I's inside, which one is me? Hear me out. I know I'm wandering, but don't start putting a lid on this racket. No telling what I'll do then. Every moment I'm thrown by your story. One moment it's happy, and I'm singing. One moment it's sad, and I'm weeping. It turns bitter, and I pull away. But then you spill a little grace, and just like that, I'm all light. It's not so bad, this arrangement, actually.

Most of us get our history through story.

Story is morally neutral. It can express profound truth or propaganda. The two greatest political storytellers of the 20th Century were Winston Churchill and Adolph Hitler. Because storytelling is a form of persuasive jujitsu, and because world is full of black belt storytellers, the corporate leader has to train both his offensive and defensive moves

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

Those who tell the stories rule society.