A Quote by Jean Hanff Korelitz

People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

Quote Topics

Make Narrative Need Offer People Up

Quote Author

Jean Hanff Korelitz
American - Novelist
Born: May 16, 1961

Some people make movies for money or glory and will take any subject people offer them. But I cannot do that. I need to feel the story and make it mine.

Euzhan Palcy

I need to tell the things that are important but which don't make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

Akhil Sharma

I want there to be hints of narrative everywhere in the image so that people can make up their own stories about them. But I don't want to have my own narrative and force it on to them.

Cindy Sherman

I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them. I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enables you to live, to do something. And sometimes, human beings need story and narrative more than they need nourishment and food.

Emma Thompson

In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.

Darin Strauss

We need to finally be proactive in enlightening people from Islamic cultural groups. And this applies to immigrants already here as well as to current refugees. The German constitution stands above the Sharia. Schools need to offer classes on gender equality. You also have to offer an alternative to young men with a penchant for violence.

Alice Schwarzer

I did grow up in a household where the narrative was about public service and how are you going to effect change and help people. I'm so glad I grew up around that narrative, but I never had the calling to go out and shake hands and try to get elected.

Lauren Bush

With my students, I don't offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative's themes can lay bare a narrative's tensions.

Edan Lepucki

We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment-nar rative catechisms.

N.D. Wilson

For queer people, the personal is very political, just to talk about it in a public space. It's very political just to come out and take up that space and be like, 'This is my narrative. It's not an outsider narrative, and it's not a fetish narrative; it's just my story, and it's worth being told and listened to.'

Ben Hopkins

If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.

Hasan M. Elahi

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

Claudia Rankine

I don't believe in doing thousands of cuts, then giving it to the editor to make the movie. 'Dump-truck directing' is my reference to that style of moviemaking. You have to know how to cut before you can shoot well. The lack of definition in movies today is appalling. Very few people know how to mount a narrative anymore. If a scene works in one cut, you don't need 10. Or it might need 10. Let's not make it 20.

Gordon Willis

You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.

Andrew Solomon

For a long time, images of black men with big lips and a round head were used to make us feel inferior, but it doesn't need to be like that, we don't need to self'loathe. We can change the narrative.