If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will.
Interpretation
Telling our own stories ensures our perspectives and experiences are represented.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-representation and storytelling. If individuals do not share their own narratives, their voices and experiences may be overlooked or misrepresented by others, highlighting the power of personal agency in shaping one’s identity and history.
In practice
In a workshop about the power of personal narratives, this quote can illustrate why participants should share their stories.
It gave me a lot of pleasure and pride that 90 percent of the crew for 'Monsoon Wedding,' and most of my film, are women. We get the work done, you know, much lesser play of ego... And I really believe in harmony, I believe in working in a spirit of egolessness and that the film is bigger than all of us.
Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I've seen, what I know - they're not all screaming faceless mullahs. It's disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named.
I think there's a level of ignorance, when, in the callowness of youth, you imagine that you are inventing the world for the first time. You imagine that your parents don't know what it feels like to fall in love.
Every film is a political act; it's how you see the world.
To make films, you have to have something to say. To have something to say, you have to be a student of life. And to be a student of life, you have to be feeding yourself with what life, politics, society, and your family fuels you with.
Every animator is really an actor performing in slow motion, living the character a drawing at a time.
When you're a kid and you're trying to find your own voice, it's rather daunting to hear somebody like Howlin' Wolf, because you know that you'll never achieve that.
The earth doesn’t care where death occurs. ...It’s the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death’s memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.
My theater has always been a political battle on the stage.
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