A Quote by Vijay Seshadri

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations. — © Vijay Seshadri
Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
And in reality, I don't think it's a real documentary. It's more a story of her life. It's a story of survival. It's a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure.
If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.
There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.
If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
'The Master and Margarita' is deeply to do with the unconscious. It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he's not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate.
The first book was a life story that I was hesitant to write anyway because I didn't feel like I had a real life story... It was a surprise hit.
Story is the oldest, commonest, most beloved, and most effective form of communication because our life is essentially a story. That's why the Bible is the most realistic of religious books. We can easily ignore or argue away abstractions, but we bump up against concretely real people, things, and events in story, as in life.
For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.
The story of my life can be told in silver: in chocolate mills, serving spoons, and services for twelve. The story of my life has nothing to do with me. The story of my life is things. Things that aren’t mine, that won’t ever be mine. It’s all I’ve ever known. I wish it wasn’t.
When an acting teacher tells a student 'that wasn't honest work' or 'that didn't seem real,' what does this mean? In life, we are rarely 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. And characters in plays are almost never 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. What exactly do teachers even mean by these words? A more useful question is: What is the story the actor was telling in their work? An actor is always telling a story. We all are telling stories, all the time. Story: that is what it is all about.
It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.
That story about the two women in my life is - a lot of people get upset, a lot of people question it. Steven Soderbergh said to me, "The story of your life is incredible. The real story of your life that's interesting, more interesting than all the other stuff - the franchises, the movies, the songs, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra - the real thing that's interesting and unbelievable is the relationship with these two women. And if you're willing to put that out there, you know then, you're going to have a great movie. Because that's the movie."
I write - and read - for the sake of the story... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?
Well, there are conjoined twins in real life and we can tell a story about them so long as they're not the brunt of the jokes. In this, they're the heroes of this story; we love these guys.
Literature is an aspect of story and story is all that exists to make sense of reality. War is a story. Now you begin to see how powerful story is because it informs our worldview and our every action, our every justification is a story. So how can story not be truly transformative? I've seen it happen in real ways, not in sentimental ways or in the jargon of New Age liberal ideology.
Any story worth telling relates to real life in some meaningful way. Scifi allows you to tell meaningful stories without seeming too preachy - it adds a metaphorical layer between the story and the real world. Scifi is dismissed as ungrounded fluff, but it's actually the opposite.
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