William Finnegan Quotes

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

When people think of dance films, they don't really think of good stories.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

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.

I like pop music because it can really affect a large amount of people and if I tell stories and spread messages that I think are really important for people to be aware of, I would want it to be on the biggest platform and I feel like pop is that. I use it as a way to tell stories.

The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid. Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.

We think we have got freedom of the press. When one millionaire has ten newspapers and ten million people have no newspapers - that is not freedom of the press.

I think there should be an Occupy Gallifrey. Because 0.000001% of the people have 99.99999% of the Time.

I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I've ever met.

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.

The Arab world had a big problem of frankly venal elites. That is why these revolutions happen, because people didn't think the opportunities were being shared fairly.

I think everybody wants to connect. There is nothing worse than feeling disconnected. And stories that really move people and make people care are the ones where they feel some sort of connection.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

I'm predisposed to think that as a people, we're hardwired to understand things through the telling of stories. I think that as human beings it's part of who we are.

I think I've done a lot of movies that people would like to have seen a sequel to. But I grew up in a time when we didn't do sequels. You just did a movie because you wanted to do a movie and you wanted to tell a story. It wasn't to build a franchise.

Help shape the stories that people are telling about you.

I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, "People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?"

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth. Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.

It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.

The big idea behind it was to somehow participate in the discussion about justice. What does it mean to be just to the others out there whose lives we do not think about. One of the answers I came up with was simply tell their stories.

It's important that we share our experiences with other people. Your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else. When you tell your story, you free yourself and give other people permission to acknowledge their own story

When I discovered that I could write music, it felt like the most natural way for me to connect with people and tell my stories. I've always thought of that as what I do: I tell stories.