Ann Leckie Quotes

Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.

I'm very interested in foundational narratives.

There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that there are a limited amount of human stories that we tell - there's about seven of them - and of course, there's variations on those stories, and they can take place in infinite places.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

All good, clean stories are melodrama; it's just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it.

Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.

Some things work better as a book, some things work better as a story, some things works better as a film.

When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'

I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.

I believe in three-act structure. When I say that to novel people, or people in the world of books, they go, 'Well, that's a film thing.' However, even a good joke has three acts.

I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually.

A good storyteller is a person with a good memory and hopes other people haven't.

Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.

True stories are way more interesting.

My job is to help my father tell stories.

Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.