Antonio Damasio Quotes

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.

When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.

Stories turn anonymous strangers into people who matter.

If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?

For me it is really important to have a story with blood in the veins, there are bad tempers and good tempers.

You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

All my jewelry has stories.

Humans know when it's not a good story. Unless you do this for a living, you may not know exactly why you don't like a story, but you can't fool an audience ever. They know when you have it and they know when you don't.

What I may intend for a story to communicate and what a story ends up communicating could be two different things. And it could be an even more positive thing.

Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.

While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.

The only way that you can ever know if something is of value to you is by the way it feels as you are receiving it

Separate the story - your story - from facts.

You just have to learn to get really good at choosing your moments and making sure that your story isn't overwhelmed by the effects, and that your emotional storyline is what's driving the train.

That's the most important thing for me in TV, telling the story to as many people as we can.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know.

I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.

Structure is important in film, but there's often structure to be found in the most unlikely of places! It's quite possible to build a structured story and retain idiosyncrasy.