Subjective Narrative Quotes

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

Our own lives always influence the way we write.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' I had eight people who were present at those interviews - they were all in the room - and when I interviewed each of them, they had a totally different narrative of events, to the degree where you thought, 'Were you all really in the same room?'

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

I suppose 'This Little Life' and 'Brick Lane' both have things in common in that they have a female protagonist very much at the centre of the story, and they're subjectively told.

I tell the stories that are of interest to me.

I was never trying to be the voice for anybody else. I was just trying to sing about what I was going through, and was singing about those things specifically because I knew there was an audience not being served.

Directing plays lacked the immediacy and connection to real world events that journalism offered; journalism lacked the drama, theatricality and subjective storytelling of theater. It wasn't until I had the idea of making a documentary film about the 1992 presidential campaign that these two passions came together in 'The War Room.'

I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.

I've yet to read a memoir by anyone I've known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.

Writing is always personal in some way but not always in a direct way.

A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.

What music can do so well is tell the truth in a subjective way.

The biography I've written about Wendy Wasserstein will almost invariably be different than the one anyone else would write.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

My films are very rooted in specific people's point of view. Some film-makers give a more global point of view, like God looking down at the characters.

'Normal' is not clinical, it's not autobiographical, and I don't claim to be objective. It's strictly my perceptions and thoughts about the people that I met and the stories that I heard. It was never meant to be an academic work.