A Narrative Quotes

#1. It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

Tobias Wolff

#2. Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.

Robert Charles Wilson

#3. Bookstores contain the residue of thousands of people who went in there to find an experience, a narrative that guided them to a new place or reinforced what they were doing.

Lauren Leto

#4. I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.

Steven Spielberg

#5. I'm a little bit too obsessed with the news. I find the news easier to follow than narrative entertainment programs.

Jon Stewart

#6. People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

#7. A myth is 'a narrative involving supernatural or fancied persons embodying popular ideas or social phenomena.' Women love telling stories ... the girl-group is a gigantic narrative full of morality tales locked up like charms in a crystallized sound.

Lucy O'Brien

#8. If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

V.S. Naipaul

#9. Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

Jaclyn Moriarty

#10. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open
the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

Jeanette Winterson

#11. Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it would ever believe.

Joan Didion

#12. Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the 'Washington Post.'

Kara Swisher

#13. Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

David Shields

#14. My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you're not strictly bound to a linear narrative.

Tommy Lee Jones

#15. Anti-narrative sequences of a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway.

David Foster Wallace

#16. The true history of Vietnamese civilian suffering does not fit comfortably into America's preferred postwar narrative - the tale of a conflict nobly fought by responsible commanders and good American boys, who should not be tainted by the occasional mistakes of a few 'bad apples' in their midst.

Nick Turse

#17. I started a production company out of necessity, the need for great narratives for actors of color.

Viola Davis

#18. After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.

Bruce Feiler

#19. At times doc filmmaking feels more rewarding creatively. Because you are creating something out of pure cinema - instead of narrative cinema, where you've got a script and a cast and you build from your foundation, whereas in documentary, you're building out of chaos.

George Hickenlooper

#20. Going slowly [ ... ] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

Paul Theroux

#21. Narratives are the primary way in which we make sense of our lives, as opposed to, for example schema,cognition, beliefs, constructs. Definition of narrative include the important element of giving meaning to events and experiences over time by connecting them as a developing, continuing story.

Jacqui Stedmon

#22. Final Fantasy VII awoke American gaming to the possibilities of narrative dynamism and the importance of relatively developed characters - no small inspiration to take from a series whose beautifully androgynous male characters often appear to be some kind of heterosexual stress test.

Tom Bissell

#23. Documentary filmmaking has all the challenges and hardships of narrative filmmaking without any of the infrastructure or support. That's both a blessing and a curse.

Brian Lindstrom

#24. A person's disposition should serve as a narrative of their lives not the pigmentation of their skin.

Henry Johnson Jr

#25. When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.

Nicholas Kristof

#26. Now in my opinion it is certainly a complete mistake to suppose that no narrative of events in this type of literature has any significance beyond the purely historical record; but it is equally rash to maintain that every single statement in those books is a complex of allegorical meanings. That

Augustine Of Hippo

#27. I sense that I am dawdling in this narrative, having already reached my eighth roll of Hieratica, and need to speed it up a little, else either I shall die on the job, or you will be worn out reading.

Robert Harris

#28. The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'

Mark Bradford

#29. We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

Paul Auster

#30. I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort of narrative, and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.

Adam Rapp

#31. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Don DeLillo

#32. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Sara Sheridan

#33. I've always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don't stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it's all happening at once.

Kate Grenville

#34. Wilmington, Del. (AP) June 14, 1966 - A fire that destroyed the city's oldest Negro church has led to the discovery of a wild slave narrative that highlights a little-known era of American history. The First United

James McBride

#35. I haven't had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case.

Chuck Palahniuk

#36. I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That's what I want to do.

Tommy Lee Jones

#37. Characters last. Beautiful writing lasts. A compelling narrative lasts. Art survives long after ideas go extinct ...

Joel Achenbach

#38. If you're a great documentary filmmaker, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a great narrative filmmaker. There are fantastic documentary filmmakers that can't direct actors. You don't have to do that in a documentary, if it's a real documentary.

Alexander Skarsgard

#39. When you're on stage, you build strong relationships with the actors, but it's a story you tell with the audience - you have to include them, you have to respond to them, they have to understand the narrative.

Romola Garai

#40. Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.

Oliver Sacks

#41. I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

Iain Banks

#42. The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.

Jean Piaget

#43. I do want to take some time and reinvent and get better and maybe get behind the camera a little more. I do want to direct at some point and start failing really early - start shooting videos and then commercials and then hopefully do some narrative.

Channing Tatum

#44. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story - a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning.

Brene Brown

#45. As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.

Dinaw Mengestu

#46. You have to like everything that you're painting. Maybe on a narrative level it seems harsh ... but I like everything in all my paintings. It's as if you need to be less intelligent at that level.

John Currin

#47. There aren't enough people in the media creation space. There aren't enough people making premium quality programming. That's how we change the narrative. Because there is a lot of bad African programming out there, and it is not helping matters.

Mo Abudu

#48. I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust.

Cory Doctorow

#49. Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood.

David Brooks

#50. Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.

David Mitchell

#51. If you don't have a narrative, just make one up. You can always change it when you have more clarity. Any narrative beats no narrative. - L. R. W. Lee

L.R.W. Lee

#52. I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.

Marianne Wiggins

#53. Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.

Andrea Seigel

#54. I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.

Ruth Ozeki

#55. Real philosophy is dense, impenetrable, so esoteric as to be unknown and so obscure as to be irrelevant... Maybe what I do is trivial, the philosophical equivalent of a Big Mac and fries

Jacob M. Held

#56. This tough-love, winner-take-all narrative dominating policymaking is far too limited a way to think about how a complex, modern, diverse economy like ours expands and thrives. The strongest periods of economic growth in the 20th century were also times when incomes rose across the board.

John Podesta

#57. We might even say that the world is always in medias res - a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative" - and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble,

Lemony Snicket

#58. I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

David O. Russell

#59. Public transit situates us so that we are given license to accept what's right in front of us, but will likely arouse our desire to compare our narrative to someone else's, to give ourselves permission to speculate upon a person's private space, or life, with no fear of recourse or punishment.

Julie Wilson

#60. I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous.

C.S. Lewis

#61. Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.

Neil Postman

#62. Art brings a message into a room. It should make us perceive in a new way - either through color, form or narrative content - something we had not perceived before ... and perhaps reveal something to you about yourself.

Gloria Vanderbilt

#63. You don't enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.

Wes Craven

#64. What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

Terry Tempest Williams

#65. Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

David Mamet

#66. I have loved football as an almost mythic game since I was in the fourth grade. To me, the game wasn't even grounded in reality. The uniform turned you into a warrior. Being on a team, the mythology of physical combat, the struggle against the elements, the narrative of the game.

Steve Sabol

#67. The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

#68. Are you repeating someone else's narrative, taking it for granted? Talk therapy sessions and 12-step recovery shares help develop the ability to present a coherent life narrative through the safe structure of clear rules of communication that support healthy self-expression and self-awareness.

Alexandra Katehakis

#69. I plan years in advance, but I like to leave enough space in the narrative scheme to change things, because I always get my best ideas the closer I come to the end of a project, after I've lived with it for a while.

Grant Morrison

#70. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]

Helen Dunmore

#71. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#72. We're remembering each other's heroes, too. We are learning each other's songs. We are reminding ourselves that we are a global family praying together. We're all trying to live in the light of the history that shines through the biblical narrative.

Shane Claiborne

#73. Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.

Jim Crace

#74. Music is such an integral part of a film and really drives the emotional narrative, it has to be integrated from the beginning.

Drake Doremus

#75. The idea that the curtain rises on what is often more or less a happy scene, and it will fall just a few hours later, and everyone will be dead or have gone mad ... I find that kind of narrative very appealing.

Daniel Handler

#76. An intensely gripping narrative ... expertly crafted and totally addictive ... a must read!

Maggie Reese

#77. In spite of the air of fablethe public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.

Edgar Allan Poe

#78. In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

Jerry Saltz

#79. Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.

Colson Whitehead

#80. Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.

Haruki Murakami

#81. There's a false narrative that only the political class has the wisdom and the ability to be commander-in- chief. But if you go back and you study the design of our country, it was really designed for the citizen statesman.

Benjamin Carson

#82. [My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge.

Nicolas Provost

#83. I like it when shows end intentionally, and Review, especially, has such a long form narrative that it feels like you need to give it a thoughtfully constructed finale.

Andy Daly

#84. Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn't fit into a grand narrative, the way we've been taught to read.

Richard Misrach

#85. There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end being a utopia of happiness that we'll reach through socialism or free trade or democracy, and then it will all be wonderful.

Pankaj Mishra

#86. 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

#87. You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#88. A continuing narrative throughout Australia's history that says it is better to build up than to tear down - this is the continuing mission of Labor.

Kevin Rudd

#89. And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.

Terry Zwigoff

#90. A lot of narrative films leave you no space for anything else but eating popcorn. I want to go in the complete opposite direction. I have to evacuate all psychology, to be less a protagonist and more a presence.

Elia Suleiman

#91. I don't really have a drive toward being a director at all. Not that I wouldn't rule it out, but I just don't think my instincts lie necessarily in a very visual way. But I am very interested in storytelling, narrative and character development, so writing is something that I absolutely want to do.

Rose McIver

#92. Author discussed what he calls the "narrative fallacy." This refers to our "limited ability" to look at a sequence of facts "without weaving an explanation into them.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#93. I want to be in a good movie, and so the narrative is way more important.

Charlize Theron

#94. Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.'

Maya Angelou

#95. I loved the show Lost, in part because the writers were so nimble in how they would take things from previous episodes, that probably weren't created with any intent towards a larger narrative, and they would get woven into narratives in a really elegant and exciting way.

Ed Helms

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. I feel the political failings of the U.S.A. are presidential in length, but the aspirant narrative of the States is millennial in length.

Jim Crace

#99. I think that if you have a strong narrative, if the idea of the song can be boiled down to the basics, it won't change that much.

Suzanne Vega

#100. Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

Helen Dunmore