Narrative Responsibility Quotes

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story.

I try my best to live by the principle that if you're going to be telling a story that you didn't live, tell it with as much respect as you can for the people who did live it.

Writing is work, but it's also a compulsion, and once you get your characters on paper, you can't abandon them. You have to respond to them.

I look at all the ingredients of a film and say, 'Is this a positive thing that I'm putting into the world? Is there honor and respect in the way the story is being told about them? And would they approve of that?'

My duty is that of a chronicler; and if I perform that conscientiously, the lessons which my observations suggest will need no pointing out.

I'm being explicit about really horrifying experiences in my life, but my hope has always been to be responsible as an artist and to avoid indulging in my misery, or to come off as an exhibitionist. I don't want to make the listener complicit in my vulnerable prose poem of depression, I just want to honor the experience. I'm not the victim here, and I'm not seeking other peoples' sympathy. I don't blame my parents, they did the best they could.

It is always just telling a story, regardless of the age of the reader. Except, if I'm writing something for kids, I know there has to be hope. I don't necessarily feel that responsibility for adults, but I emphatically feel it for children. That's the only difference. There's no syntax difference. There's no semantics difference. There's no thematic difference.

My performance, I believe, is about my duty to the script, and my duty to the story that we're trying to tell, and I try to do that in a way that is true, in a way that's going to hold up the script, and that's going to be fun for the viewers to watch.

The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.

I try to do the story the way I feel the story should be done, and how that folds into whatever larger sorts of categories or questions is really none of my business.

A story is a burden which must be carried with as much care as we carry a sleeping child

I do think we have a responsibility to be aware of the stories we're telling and how those stories will be interpreted and what sorts of value systems we're celebrating.

The journalistic 'I' is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.

Though 'Child's Play' is ultimately more concerned with subverting storytelling expectations and satirizing the expected trajectory of traditional mystery, Posadas does embed some insights about the writer's responsibility to the reader.

I'm always excited to carry more and more weight and responsibility within a story.

My books deliberately provide no answers or messages. I'm drilled in the habit of objectivity and also aware that the steady drip of fiction has more power than facts to shape opinion, so I handle it with caution.

Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.

The evil of storytelling is you're trying to make the audience complicit in murder - 'Kill the guy! Jump him!' And then once you've done it, it's like, 'I've killed this guy, now what?'

There's definitely a delicate line you have to walk in telling someone else's story that's not quite as delicate in telling your own story. I think when I'm working on a personal story, there's less pressure to try to get it exactly right.

The harder part of doing a real story is that there are real people and you have a responsibility to not just go crazy with their lives and have them do things which are not their character, that they then have to live with.

The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.

Even a writer like me, who, in 'The Firebird,' is telling the story of people who've been dead for nearly three centuries, needs to take care. Those people may not be around any longer to tell me what actually happened, but neither are they able to defend themselves against unjust portrayals.

There's a responsibility to the story, but there's also the sense of fun you have. When everybody else leaves, you get to continue to create. For me, there's no other way! I really like creating from the ground up.

Sometimes you have to go places with characters and emotions within yourself you don't want to do, but you have a duty to the story and as a storyteller to do it.