A Quote by Errol Morris

I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories. — © Errol Morris
I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories.
I think the best artists find ways to reinvent themselves. They find new ways to tell their stories, or they find new stories to tell.
Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.
We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.
My music is part of the quest I have to find new ways of telling stories, and also, I want to inspire people.
It's hard to find really original, compelling works of fiction, for women especially. I find that these true life stories about these women that I'm so blessed to play are some of the most compelling stories, and the truth is stranger than fiction.
That's what ever great writer, I believe, has done over the course of time - is they've figured out new ways of telling the same stories.
These artists all have some kind of message to the public. These messages can be quite personal, maybe about their own existential situation, and it can be about suffering, it can be about questioning of one's existence and so on. They are all telling us very genuine stories, which are touching us in different ways and they are enlightening in different ways. But it's not only the stories themselves, but it's how it is done - that creates the impact of the story. It is not what is said but how it is said. I don't think you can dissociate the content from the form.
Print-on-demand publishing is the new farm system for new voices in fiction. Authors who have compelling things to say, who can market their stories in compelling ways, will succeed.
Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.
My life isn't very racy or exciting so I make things up, tell stories. I like telling stories.
Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.
Why the connection with musicians? I think it's because in the end we're doing very similar things - we're telling stories, we're using poetic, lyrical language, and we're distilling stories down into their simplest form. We're both telling a story in two languages - word and music for them; and word and image for me.
There are many different ways of telling an interactive story, I think. I don't think there's a right one and a wrong one. There are different games telling different types of stories in different ways.
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.
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