subjective storytelling Quotes

Every story you tell is your own story.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.

I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can't totally be trusted.

Journalists in newspapers and in many magazines are not permitted to be subjective and tell their readers what they think. Journalists have got to follow a very strict formulaic line, and here we come, these non-fiction writers, these former journalists who are using all the techniques that journalists are pretty much not allowed to use.

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.

Much of my work has been done in first person.

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

If you want the film [La La Land ] to represent all things jazz, it does not. You'll be disappointed by that. But, if you just see it as one guy's point of view, one filmmaker's point of view, and one story among many stories that can be told about jazz, then it's not as much of an issue.

I always write about my own experiences, whether I've had them or not.

I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

Artists have the unique ability to tell stories. It's not charts and graphs that get people to change.

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

Nothing I ever wrote had a message. It was just my own personal experience.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience.

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

You know, you find that these stories ... will turn one of us into the good guy and one of us into the bad guy. If you look at it closely or even not that closely ... it's ridiculous.

Film is the only technology that allows us to share subjectivity with someone else.

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.

I'm gonna write from personal experience, from emotion, from whatever the hell I'm feeling that day.

there is no truly honest autobiography.