Unreliable Narratives Quotes

Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.

Just to show you how little reliance can be placed even on what are supposed the best accounts of a battle, I mention that there are some circumstances mentioned in General -'s account which did not occur as he relates them. It is impossible to say when each important occurrence took place, or in what order.

All truths begin as hearsay, as far as I'm concerned.

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.

While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end.

Administrations of both parties lie. The question is the weightiness of the lies.

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

If two of your films don't do well, people say you're out in the cold and your career is over. One film does well, and you've had the best year of your life! I don't believe in all that's written.

This impressed me when I was the editor of the Sunday Times [of London] - we had the "Bloody Sunday" killings of 13 unarmed civilians by British paratroopers. We interviewed 500 people for our report, and not one of them could give us a total picture of what was happening. It was like the Rashomon effect multiplied a million times. For a website or even a newspaper to be a collector of information flow is not the highest form of journalism.

Everyone has an opinion of who you are and what your relationship is about, things that you've done or didn't do in your relationship - and it's just all crap, really. Things that are written about it are all crap.

There's certain things that people hold as truth but that are not always necessarily true.

To people who don't know me I'm defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.

Some talk shows have become so exploitive and tabloid, I wonder if I can believe some of their guests. Where do they find these guests, and why do they deserve air time?

The media tends to report rumors, speculations, and projections as facts... How does the media do this? By quoting some 'expert'... you can always find some expert who will say something hopelessly hopeless about anything.

To begin with myself, then, the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost every one is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds.

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.

One thing 'Game of Thrones' has taught us all is to guard against too much emotional investment.

Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Many witnesses to the shooting of Michael Brown made statements inconsistent with other statements they made and also conflicted with the physical evidence. Some were completely refuted by the physical evidence.