Biased Narrative Quotes

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.

We know that reality was a well known liberal bias.

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit.

I am opposed to autobiographies, mainly because most autobiographies lie.

I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

The Russians were doing a lot of rotten things, you can point to them. But the idea that if you consider what Hans Morgenthau called "I called abuse of reality," the picture of the world was almost the opposite of what they presented. But somehow this sells and is continually repeated, at least in this kind of situation.

When you don't have access to a subject, and all you have is ex-members and critics, there is this gravitational pull toward telling a certain version of events. Scientology would say this, and they have a point, that it's like doing a portrait of a marriage in which you're only hearing from the ex-wife and not the ex-husband.

It's unfortunate people can twist and turn things to fit whatever narrative they'd like it to fit.

Everybody rewrites history if he can.

The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us.

You couldn't always trust the history books. They told a diluted truth, a truth by committee.

However, those who have used those words use half the sentence to fit their purpose, which, of course, I believe is to discredit me and the new Nation of Islam that has come up around me.

Each one writes history according to his convenience.

When 93 percent of our stories are told by white men, it's an issue. And if those white men go on and tell the stories the way they see their world, which is all white, then it's an even bigger problem.

I love documentaries. My problem is when the filmmaker becomes the star.

Alfred Hitchcock, Isaac Newton, Elvis Presley, Captain Bligh, they're heroic or pathetic depending on which book you buy.

Patriotism corrupts history.

Ezra clapped his hands. "all right," he said. "In addition to the books we're reading as a class, I want to do an extra side project on unreliable narrators." Devon Arliss raised her hand. "what does that mean?" Ezra strode around the room. "well, the narrator tells us the story in the book, right? But what if... the narrator isn't telling us the truth? Maybe he's telling us his skewed version of the story to get you on his side. Or to scare you. Or maybe he's crazy!

Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all.

Let's say that history is what happened. The record of what happened is how each individual happens to see those events. They've already been filtered. When the historian or biographer takes over, history is no longer exactly what happened, because there has been a process of selection going on; it's impossible to write about anyone, any event, in any period of time, without in some way imposing, even unconsciously, your own standards, your own values.

All writers are propagandists.

'Carol' is so distorted by point-of-view.

It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.