Top 100 A Narrative Quotes
#1. People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#2. To create a collection, you need a narrative - an explanation to tell the team.
Dries Van Noten
#3. I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.
Jonathan Kozol
#4. I'm looking for a charismatic character - somebody who you just want to look at and listen to and whom the camera likes. I'm also looking for a narrative arc: Something is going to happen, and there will be a question that will make you wonder what happens at the end.
Marshall Curry
#5. Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.
Natasha Trethewey
#6. A shattered narrative is still a narrative. We can't escape it, it is what we are.
Jill Talbot
#7. I'm a narrative-minded actor. I'm thinking of the story. I'm not worried about whether the camera is on the right side of my face, or where the camera is. I'm just going for the story.
Mark Duplass
#8. That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.
Edward Hirsch
#9. My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.
Kate Christensen
#10. 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
#11. History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
Hilary Mantel
#12. Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.
John Fowles
#13. I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
Brian Eno
#14. Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#15. Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There's no joy of discovery in what you're doing if that's your strategy.
Bob Shacochis
#16. Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren't neurotic, but could aim themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling.
Zadie Smith
#17. Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
Marilyn Hacker
#18. [ ... ] everything has a narrative, really, and if you can't understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you're not really alive at all.
Catherynne M Valente
#19. As project chief you are creating a narrative, a story, a good yarn. If you look at the process-journey that way, you and your gang will ... dramatically up the odds of a WOW outcome!
Tom Peters
#20. The history of mankind is little else than a narrative of designs which have failed and hopes that have been disappointed.
Samuel Johnson
#21. We lay out our lives in a narrative we understand, like a movie, but are you enjoying making it or are you wondering who's watching my movie.
Donald Glover
#22. While we can all access articles and information in so many places now - across blogs, in newspapers, on video - there is something very powerful about putting it all together into an edited format in a single issue that has a narrative stretching across the themes.
Michael Wolf
#23. I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.
Mira Nair
#24. She thought, instead, with longing of more books - of buying books - of slipping into a narrative of other people's lives. That was release.
Peter Straub
#25. In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
Gore Vidal
#26. OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio's genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.
Nick Flynn
#27. A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story.
Thomas Boswell
#28. If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.
Lorrie Moore
#29. The two have to go hand in hand - the atmosphere and the music. I actually get rather worried if I can't see the music first. There always needs to be a mood, a feeling, a story, even if it is abstract. There's got to be a narrative to guide things before they're even created.
Alison Goldfrapp
#30. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Joan Didion
#31. You need to be able to climb into a narrative and zip it up under your chin. You need to be able to see through the eyes of the hero, smell what he's smelling, hear what he's hearing.
Geraldine McCaughrean
#32. Somebody once asked me if I have anything like faith, and I said I have faith in the narrative. I have a belief in a narrative that is bigger than me, that is alive and I trust will work itself out.
Joss Whedon
#33. As a designer, you have to think in time and see things in sequence. You have to see information as a narrative form - Paul Mijksenaar quoted by Kim Baer
Paul Mijksenaar
#34. They are being offered a narrative, an historical story whose hope of 'salvation' lies not in a flight from history but in a great convulsive change within history, a transformation in which there will be continuity with the present as well as discontinuity.
N. T. Wright
#35. That's what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction - it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.
Maggie Nelson
#36. The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism,' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.
Tony Kushner
#37. Do you dislike your role in the story, your place in the shadow? What complaints do you have that the hobbits could not have heaved at Tolkien? You have been born into a narrative, you have been given freedom. Act, and act well until you reach your final scene.
N.D. Wilson
#38. Every life has a beginning, a middle, and an end; dissect history and you'll see the word that defines it as a tale, a narrative.
Jodi Picoult
#39. What is a memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself.
Stanley Kauffmann
#40. I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.
Sam Keen
#41. The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don't. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don't speak in dialogue. Their lives don't unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.
Aaron Sorkin
#42. I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.
V.S. Naipaul
#43. The power of the documentary film, when done well, I think is usually more impacting than a narrative, at least for me. Documentaries are also cheaper, they are more accessible to make.
Richard Ray Perez
#44. People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#45. Such a narrative as this demands some sort of physical consolation for its spiritual tribulation. Our heroine received it in one last cup of tea. The reader may be advised to do so likewise.
Emily C.A. Snyder
#46. So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.
James Cameron
#47. I don't think that the people in my stories are lying to themselves. Well, some of them are - everybody is at some level. But there is something about how they all inhabit a narrative of their own making.
Joshuah Bearman
#48. Fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph.
Andrew Solomon
#49. At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention.
Julia Bacha
#50. I always tend to think, even in residential projects, about what a space is being asked to do - where is it located, what are the circumstances, where can I attack the problem, so to speak. How can you create a narrative for people moving through it? How can you convey its character?
Annabelle Selldorf
#51. The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.
Elif Batuman
#52. Good writing takes advantage of a reader's expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc.
Steven Pinker
#53. Liberals are so committed to a narrative of oppression and exploitation that they can't take good news, they can't accept good news.
Jonathan Haidt
#54. I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
Ben Gibbard
#55. The best approach is to write a narrative, "slice of life" essay where you focus on a smaller incident, event or moment, and then expand the essay to share what you learned from it.
Janine Robinson
#56. When you're in the studio, you've got a narrative for what goes on, you might switch on a bit of gear and it might not work as you intended or come out a bit wrong, and you try and exploit it.
Rob Brown
#57. I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.
Milan Kundera
#58. Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative.
Gao Xingjian
#59. Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes.
Julian Barnes
#60. I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story.
Shane Black
#61. If you are looking for a happy book about beautiful people, this is the wrong story. If you are looking for a narrative without emotion, without regrets, and without mistakes, this is definitely the wrong story.
R.K. Ryals
#62. The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random.
Robin Marantz Henig
#63. Pictures, even beautifully drawn pictures, that do not properly relate to one another in a narrative sequence do not make good comics.
Carl Potts
#64. It would in retrospect appear to be a stop on a narrative path that was inevitable, but this is only because most events, most paths, feel inevitable in retrospect.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#66. Uncertainty is a good thing at the end of a narrative. A simultaneous gain and loss captures the complexity of human existence. The way one sentence follows another, if we pay attention to syntax and rhythm, should express the final effect we want the narrative to have on a reader.
Lee Martin
#67. There's a bit more of a safe distance when you're making a narrative movie, a bit more perspective. Audiences can separate themselves from the harsh reality of the facts a little bit more and think: 'Okay, how do I consider this?'
Tom McCarthy
#68. There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy.
Anne Michaels
#69. It's impossible for one or two people to go out and shoot a narrative film; you need to have a cast, the person shooting sound, whatever. But you can legitimately have a couple people and go and do a documentary.
Jeremy Coon
#70. I used to use a lot of words in the paintings but stopped because it created a narrative - or an answer to a question.
Danny Fox
#71. I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
Djuna Barnes
#72. Most religions live from a narrative that shapes their relationship with the divine other, God or the gods, and with the human other, the stranger.
Timothy Radcliffe
#73. I'm not interested in being perfect when im older. Im interested in having a narrative. It's the narrative that's really the most beautiful thing about women.
Jodie Foster
#74. 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
#75. We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth, if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos - these are the promises art makes.
Kathryn Harrison
#77. I'm so used to being in a theater where there is always a narrative, but I'm more about the still moment, the painter inside me.
Ragnar Kjartansson
#78. Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.
Steven Pinker
#79. I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, What happened next?
A.J.P. Taylor
#80. The word "story" is short for the word "history." They both have the same root and fundamentally mean the same thing. A story is a narrative on an event or series of events, just like history.
James M. Kouzes
#81. If there's a narrative, I want it in the flesh.
Jenny Saville
#82. 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
#83. Studies show that when ordinary people do something wrong - break a promise, commit a murder - they usually fold it into a narrative that denies or at least diminishes their guilt.
Jonathan Gottschall
#84. Small paintings can be fantastic. But you can't often get a narrative out of a small painting. In any case, museums are huge places, and you want to take up some space.
Gary Hume
#85. Kurkov loves his weltschmerz as much as the next guy
but he doesn't see why weltschmerz shouldn't come bundled up with a narrative that kicks a little bit of ass
the edge of the left cheek, say.
Nick Hornby
#86. When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.
John Niven
#87. I first read 'The Lord of the Rings' as an adolescent. It's a dense novel, a sprawling, complex monster of a book populated with a prolific number of characters caught up in a narrative structure that, frankly, does not lend itself to conventional storytelling.
Peter Jackson
#88. My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters.
Khaled Hosseini
#89. I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.
Jeff Kinney
#90. Oh yeah, I grew up with comics. You know, I always like to describe myself as a 'narrative junkie.' I love novels, I love comics, movies, TV. If it's a good story, I'm hooked.
David Liss
#91. 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
#92. An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.
William C. Brown
#93. I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together.
Stephen Malkmus
#94. The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.
Deborah Eisenberg
#95. This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.
Walter Kirn
#96. I'm a memoir writer. I try to understand the world by taking experiences I have and making them into a story, whether it's a narrative memoir, blogging for The Huffington Post, writing poems, or talking on the screen about what has happened to me and how that relates to the world at large.
Staceyann Chin
#97. It's very easy, if you come from a place like Pakistan, to imagine that there's a narrative of American aggression towards the place that you come from. But that, in itself, is just a political view.
Mohsin Hamid
#98. Torah is not merely a collection of prohibitions, rigid strictures and boring observances. Rather, it is a narrative of the blessings and promises of God initially offered to one person and family, but through which the whole world will ultimately be blessed.
Walter C. Kaiser Jr.
#99. European children are educated in a narrative of human tolerance every day, and if you want to be sure to prevent a backlash, you should at least think of bringing Muslim children and teenagers into the fold of that narrative of tolerance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#100. It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author," and that alone made me glad I had come.
Elizabeth Strout
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