David Malouf saying smart things....

Whilst speaking to Tony Jones on LateLine, David Malouf dropped these gems that made both of our ears twitch...

...some of what belongs to what is told belongs to others, and, you know, how somebody affects others determines how they will tell his story too. I mean what is interesting in all of that is that all of these stories are open, and what survives is not what happened, but what gets told, and what gets told can change.

I was interested just recently to see Umberto Eco in an interview saying quite plainly, "We are narrative creatures; if we are to understand something, we need a story, that's how we humans understand things." And he said, "If you want to tell a child what a tree is, the simplest thing to do is to begin with a story and say, 'once upon a time there was a seed." The child will understand absolutely what the tree is. And he goes on to say that computers are pretty much the same. If you want them to acquire certain kinds of information, they, too, need to be told a story.