Lisa McMann Quotes

Still, records are documents of a period of time. Most records are documents of two or three years, and I just approached it as a record I was doing over a 20-year period of time.

A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.

A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.

People put dates on any kind of comment that you make.

Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

The present is a point just passed.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events.

I painted myself into a corner by writing a whole book on this one period. The summer of 1927 came to an end, but nothing else did - all of these peoples' lives went on.

I start with the history, and I ask myself, 'What are the great turning points? What are the big dramatic scenes that are essential to telling the story?'

Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.

I have a strong impulse to protect history and time and the lineage of events.

That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.

The second time is the one we remember, where memory begins. Putting the moments in order is only half the story. What matters is the weight of the moments as they accumulate.

History is not made of up major media headlines and daily blogs and attacks.

History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is.

Time itself is talked about as something that is unusual, that there could be a parallel time.

We parcel up time into years and months and days because without compartmentalisation the tundra of time is impossible to navigate.

Every frame of every film is from a particular time. So, if you make a film in 2017, the times can't not have a bearing.

'Reign' is probably the oldest one on the record. I wrote that when I was 19. 'The Dead They Don't Come Back,' which is the last song on the album, I wrote when I was 20, and 'Harlem River' I just wrote last year. It spans from 2007 to 2012.

Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.

The only serious function films can serve is to act as a record of their times.