narrative origins Quotes

I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.

I personally adore origin stories - they're so intriguing, learning what shaped and formed a character.

Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.

Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

Tracing the beginnings of the interwoven stories of science can be arbitrary, as beginnings are so often lost in the mists of time.

There’s no story that’s the start of itself.

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?

Where does a story truly begin? In life, there are seldom clear-cut beginnings, those moments when we can, in looking back, say that everything started. Yet there are moments when fate intersects with our daily lives, setting in motion a sequence of events whose outcome we could never have foreseen.