Narrative Manipulation Quotes

Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.

It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

It's unfortunate people can twist and turn things to fit whatever narrative they'd like it to fit.

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

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

You always have to be ahead of the audience so that they have to always catch up and know the movie's not quite going exactly where you think it's going, or expecting it to be going.

Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.

Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.

History is written by the winners. The books say the Indians were bad guys and the whites just needed a little land. It's like, Excuse me, let me take your car. I'm discovering it. I'm putting my flag on your windshield.

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

The idea of telling a story in reverse destabilises your ordinary moral reactions. That's one of the points of art - to challenge your preconceptions.

Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.

I think most people aren't really privy to how stories are developed and what stories are - make it to the front page or to the mainstream media, whether it's in print or in broadcast. And I think they'd be shocked and disappointed to see some of the bias that exists in some of the stories that don't get told - or the manner in which they are told.

The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you have no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch. If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about "a handsome prince"... was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called handsome? As for "a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long"... well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories don't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told.

'Oppressed' is one of the terms that's very, very sellable and easily thrown around these days because everybody feels it, no matter what side you're on. We thrive on it. We're addicted to it.

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

History is written by victors and, occasionally, sensationalist journalists. I mean that with the best respect.

I first read 'Lolita' when I was 16, which I think is a little bit young. But it was a thrilling and disturbing read because it was the first time I really sensed that you could have an unreliable narrator, that you didn't have to sort of tell the truth in a narrative, that there could be something deeper and richer and more complicated going on.

It's very dangerous for a storyteller to walk into a situation with a political agenda because you end up telling a story about issues instead of telling a story about people.

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

The assembly has witnessed how historical truth is established. Once an allegation is repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation. It is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.