The telling of stories creates the real world.
The simple act of telling a woman's story from a woman's point of view is a revolutionary act: it never has been done before.
History is written by those who win and those who dominate.
I think women can tell the most profound and interesting and fascinating stories.
But this too is true: stories can save us.
The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'
Visual storytelling is at once immediate and subversive.
Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.
How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.
Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
I can't impress enough upon people that if you tell an honest story that people relate to and people believe and invest in, you can do anything.
What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself.
Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future.
I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the real, in a way. It's like white light - if you put everyday reality through a prism you get this rainbow of colors that you couldn't see before. I'm interested in exploring the world to show the things that are invisible. And not just undocumented aspects of reality, but to actually make manifest things that have been hitherto invisible through the intervention of filmmaking.
You want people to feel something when you tell a story, whether they feel happy or whether they feel sad.
Literature births activists.
The point of what I do is that it doesn't really matter what a book or a story is as long it moves you, informs you, challenges you, entertains you, or changes you.
I think it can be really powerful, and one of the reasons I love making films is I do feel they can reach beyond the statistics and the numbers and the complexities of a particular issue and really highlight the humanity in a way that an article or newspaper story might not be able to do.
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
I was swept by the narrative structure of film... you can create a world, you can destroy it, you can do what you want with it and serve it to people just the way you like.
Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.
Right around my first year of college - I remember "Song of Solomon," by Toni Morrison, just moved me tremendously. The power of language and how it can peel back truths, bring things to the surface. So I learned a lot from fiction.
The strength of a story is that it stays with people and it gives an opportunity for that story to connect with people where the Holy Spirit intends for it to do so.
