Narrative Justice Quotes

When I choose a role, what I'm looking for is the ability is to tell our stories. Me being a black woman, that's just a given. It's going to be a part of any role I do, making sure I tell it truthfully and nuanced and in a way that many people can relate to.

All that a truth commission can achieve is to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse.

I try my best to live by the principle that if you're going to be telling a story that you didn't live, tell it with as much respect as you can for the people who did live it.

Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

I guess you could say I've written a lot about one thing as a journalist. But I hardly ever saw it as exclusively about race. To my mind, it was more about telling stories of people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. Invisible people.

I'm a Midwestern girl, born and bred. It's harder for some of us to write about things closer to home. It's not so much a fear of telling the truth but wanting to do it justice.

The big idea behind it was to somehow participate in the discussion about justice. What does it mean to be just to the others out there whose lives we do not think about. One of the answers I came up with was simply tell their stories.

I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.

When a novel is based on an actual crime, it should do much more than loosely fictionalize it. The novel must stand alone as a work of art that justifies using the story for its own purposes.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

Every child deserves to see themselves in stories they can enjoy, but it isn't the place of white people to decide how and why those stories are created and marketed.

I'm from outside most of these worlds I'm focusing on, and I feel there's an ethical approach to making these kinds of films. My biggest fear is that if you paint your characters in, you could be doing them wrong.

I don't think kids of color should have to search far and wide to find books that reflect their experience.