Narrative Representation Quotes

There is that great proverb - that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail - the bravery, even, of the lions.

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Storytelling is always evolving, but if you allow people with new voices and perspectives to come in, you open audiences up to different walks of life.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

I just think of myself as a writer. Yes, I'm a woman. And I'm a writer. The main challenge is that I like to write stories about young women, and society doesn't place much of a premium on young women's stories. And I think that's why I gravitate towards it. I really honor that, and I treasure that time, and they should be given that respect.

It's interesting how thrillers reflect the times we live in.

Often, in books, I find female power to be cartoonish - power is a process, an evolution - it has responsibilities. It's not as simple as picking up your lightning bolt and throwing it at someone.

Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.

It would be great to bust through and make history. But what's more important is the opportunity to continue to get roles that are complicated and wonderful, to be a part of the narrative and to get to do what our counterparts are able to do. It doesn't just stop at holding an award.

I think at a certain point actors need to start taking responsibility for the kinds of stories they want to tell.

Novels describe what it means to be alive at a given moment.

Why would a novel - which is all about the inward processes of people's developing feelings and developing relationships - why would you be able to portray that in pictures with as few words as possible, which is what the best films are?

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.

Trans voices are really underrepresented, and trans stories are really underrepresented, and when they are presented, they're often reductive. I was interested in putting a trans person and a trans narrative on stage that didn't fall into cliché, that thought a bit more deeply about the experience of being trans, and how those issues tie into things that we all experience. How we tell the story of our lives, versus what might have actually happened, and how we communicate to our former selves. All of those questions were really interesting to me.

I do think we have a responsibility to be aware of the stories we're telling and how those stories will be interpreted and what sorts of value systems we're celebrating.

I wish I was a writer but I'm not. We can just hope that people realise that women actually have incredible stories to tell so tell them.

The strength of 'The Gift' is that the people featured and their stories are given the space to speak for themselves.

People have suggested that perhaps we are too affluent to be telling this story, which is amazing to me because then I wonder what story I am allowed to tell. Having been working with the homeless for the past years, I noticed lots of things about them, but one thing I really noticed was that they were probably too busy just getting though the day to make a film about themselves.

With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.