Top 100 Quotes About Narrative
#1. All writers, all storytellers, are imposing their own narrative on something.
Michael Kimmelman
#2. History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.
Simon Schama
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Through the potent example of his own life, President Obama enabled us to believe the best about America, and, therefore, about ourselves. That uplifting narrative - essentially equating the promise of America with his extraordinary life story - swept candidate Obama into the presidency.
Cynthia P. Schneider
#8. I'm a little bit too obsessed with the news. I find the news easier to follow than narrative entertainment programs.
Jon Stewart
#9. People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#10. Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?
Don DeLillo
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. ... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician's art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it's fascinating, it's fun, and it's free!
Paul Lockhart
#14. 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
#16. One narrative, about the hated people in our lands, is that eventually they get what is coming to them.
Daniel Handler
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the 'Washington Post.'
Kara Swisher
#20. Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.
David Shields
#21. 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
#22. The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.
Jen Pollock Michel
#23. 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
#24. THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.
Orson Scott Card
#25. I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.
James Gunn
#26. 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
#27. I started a production company out of necessity, the need for great narratives for actors of color.
Viola Davis
#28. When you have the national narrative being "crack is awful and black people are using it," why go against that narrative when you want to get that publication in The New York Times or wherever? It encourages people to play right into it.
Carl Hart
#29. It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.
Harry Mathews
#30. 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
#31. We need to know not only what is done but what is purposed and said by those who shape the destines of states and realms." Horace Greeley
Harold Holzer
#32. The body of work I create combines traditional storylines and postmodern narrative strategies to approach themes such as belonging, identity politics and conflict, as well as the push towards - and resistance against - modernization.
Aman Mojadidi
#34. The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.
Patrick Marber
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. If you're not [Federico] Fellini you might make something very vulgar. Animation made it possible to maintain unity with all these different narratives.
Marjane Satrapi
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. A person's disposition should serve as a narrative of their lives not the pigmentation of their skin.
Henry Johnson Jr
#42. When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.
Nicholas Kristof
#43. The missional church will take context seriously, but will also work on recovering the biblical narrative with its richness and potency for today's world. When story and context are equally embraced, we are beginning to think and act missionally.
Michael Frost
#44. Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
W.S. Gilbert
#45. I am thoroughly tired of the fable style of narrative and shall do my best to get up something entirely different and possibly little more worthy.
George Ade
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
Ian McEwan
#52. 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
#53. Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.
Lucas Neff
#54. 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
#56. In the progressive narrative, America is to blame, and the first offenders were the Founders themselves. The progressive conclusion is that the founding was "defective," setting up the progressive agenda to replace and move away from founding principles, what Obama called the "remaking" of America.
Dinesh D'Souza
#57. Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.
Ali Smith
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.
Todd Haynes
#63. Characters last. Beautiful writing lasts. A compelling narrative lasts. Art survives long after ideas go extinct ...
Joel Achenbach
#64. 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
#65. The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.
Victor LaValle
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos.
Julianne Moore
#69. 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
#70. The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.
Jean Piaget
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.
Simon McBurney
#76. You can't just say what's going to happen ahead of time. That's not how physical law works. That's narrative. And when reality is twisted to fit narrative, that's not natural. That's someone making stories happen.
Ryan North
#77. 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
#78. The startling truth is this: as this narrative unfolded, amidst all the voices breaking free, telling their stories for the first time, the loudest voice of all was that of Norman Rockwell.
Jane Allen Petrick
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.
Samuel Beckett
#84. As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.
David Hare
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
Terry Tempest Williams
#99. In the fall of 1989, I was writing 600-word columns at the 'Herald.' My heart always was in long-form narrative writing, though. It's what I cut my teeth on at the 'Boston Phoenix.'
Charlie Pierce
#100. 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
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