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.
Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from another.
We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.
How we remember changes how we have lived. Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.
As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I've always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks.
Everybody's got stories. I don't want to not have stories.
Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.
In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.
The stories in the songs come from my real life.
As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.
From the time we open our eyes, we live in a Steadicam form, and the only editing is when we talk about our lives or remember things.
It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.
I've fallen out very badly with some of the subjects I've interviewed, because they see their lives a certain way; to step into a cinema and see your life depicted in another way can come as a terrible shock.
Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people - the autobiographists and the biographists.
That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.
