Shared Narrative Quotes

My story is one of millions, and the others aren't often told.

What thoughts are to the individual, art is to the community as a whole. That's where you reflect on who you are, who you hope to be, what you've gone through, and where you hope to go.

Everyone has a ghost story, or at least that's how it has always seemed to me.

My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

I love trying to forge a contract between creator and audience in which we are able to meet halfway, each injecting a part of our own experiences into a story that's being told.

Love is a story we tell with another person. It's cocreation through conarration. When you hit bumps in the road and challenges, you write a new chapter in your story together. Love is the constant act of revising and retelling your own story in real time. You don't do it by yourself. You do it with someone else. The only way you do that is to talk to each other and create a shared narrative.

The Bible tells a story. A story that isn’t over. A story that is still being told. A story that we have a part to play in.

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

What I want people to recognize is that we have to keep working together and take charge because we all have the same story.

When you're working in a collaborative storytelling medium, every step of the way, you're opening yourself up.

To share a story is in part to take ownership of it, especially because you are often able to comment on a story that you are sharing on social media.

If you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience, and there is something at Christmas that unites everybody. It already sets a stage within the stage.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

My story has been the story of my generation.

Human connections are deeply nurtured in the field of shared story.

We use the word 'synoptic' to talk about Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and it really means 'seeing together,' because they all have a similar perspective. Matthew and Luke - whoever wrote those Gospels - used Mark as a focus and as a basic story. So all of them have a lot in common.

Everybody's got a Reggie story.

It's profound to watch a little African-American girl light up when she raps as George Washington and she realizes that Washington's story is her story. That this history belongs to all of us.

Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

I couldn't be a one-woman show, since I wouldn't have anybody to bounce off from. Once you're out there, dribbling on, you have nobody to interrupt you. I love being part of a company, and telling a story.

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

With 'Crucible,' any big changes I wanted to make I only had to run by Lucasfilm, not other authors whose stories I might affect.

The thing I love about theater is the fact that everyone's complicit. We're either there as a storyteller, or we're there as a listener, and it's basically a campfire situation.