Variant: You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?”
Source: Finnikin of the Rock
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Melina Marchetta 204
Australian teen writer 1965Related quotes

“I do not ask you about the dead past. I bring you to the living present.”
1860s, Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army? (1863)

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
As quoted in The Human Condition (1958) by Hannah Arendt. This appears as part of a statement in a 1957 interview where she speaks of a friend's comments about her:
I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.
Interview with Bent Mohn in The New York Times Book Review (3 November 1957)
Paraphrased variant : All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”
Source: Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)