Debra Granik Quotes

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

I think that when we look at something that's well acted and a story that's well told, it allows us to be a mirror of who we are as human beings and as a culture, and offers a glimpse of where we're headed.

I just wanted to tell good stories that helped explain the world to people.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

At the age of 60, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life.

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands.

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

The knowledge I have now is not the knowledge I had then.

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes anothers.

You rehear your life by reading about what happens to other people.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

Perspective is the most important thing to have in life.

Wisdom may best arise from a humbling reality.

You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.