Personal Narratives Quotes

Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels - make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.

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.

There are stories we take on from our culture, and there are stories based on our own personal history. Some of those stories lock us in limiting beliefs and lead to suffering, and there are others that can move us toward freedom.

Me releasing my music, if anything, is an opportunity to show the world my stories and tell the world my stories.

It's nice to dig deeper into people who may look one way but always have a story to tell. I obviously write about that a lot.

Everybody goes through a lot of the same things, and I talk about those, and that's the key. You have to connect with your audience, and I might take them on a trip with me, tell them I went here and I went there and they'll go with me, you know, to hear the stories.

We make progress only when people are willing to speak about what their lives are like and what they care about. We make it possible for others to understand our perspective.

A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.

You'd tell the world what your best friend wore to sleep if you thought it made a good enough story.

It's great to engage with the mainstream media to get messages out, but the most empowering tool is to create records of our lives, and our own images, which are not filtered through judgements, biases, or misunderstandings.

There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life.

I'm not the go-to guy. Everybody is trying to tell their story and have different ways of telling it.

Stories turn anonymous strangers into people who matter.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.

Very few people are fortunate enough to walk through countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and I had seen them all. I had spoken to many on the street.

There was not a lot of great Civil War literature written by people who participated in it. It was too traumatic.

All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

All my works over the years have been autobiographical in the sense they reflect some part of my life, although I have fictionalised them to an extent.

I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

The thing that keeps me being a performer is my interest in society's obsession with identity, because I'm not sure that I really believe identity exists.

I think being a singer-songwriter... your job is to tell a story that other people can't really tell themselves.