Narrative Selection Quotes

Great deeds give choice of many tales. Choose a slight tale, enrich it large, and then let wise men listen.

In a sea of stories, find the right one to tell, and the right way to tell it.

When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that's true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.

I make different choices in regards to the stories I want to be a part of. In my mind, it's a totally different medium. Commercials are little skits, and movies are stories; I became a little more picky in my choices for stories that I wanted to be involved in.

Something about writing needs a sort of distance not to be involved as a writer - just something that makes it easier to write. You have to make choices all the time - what to tell and what not to tell.

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives?

I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

I'm really not opposed to playing anything as long as it's a story that I want to tell.

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.