Jean Hanff Korelitz Quotes

We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

I think that we're pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there's no puzzle pieces left over.

We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.

How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.

Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.

Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.

There is very much a sense of different versions of storytelling within our 'Camelot' - who tells those stories, who creates them, who shifts them.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

That is what I was more drawn to - creating stories while changing and altering reality.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

No matter how stark the reality, a human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable.

I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

Usually with film writing I start with characters, and set about writing their story.

All we have is the story we tell.

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.