Quotes About Narrative

#1. The ironic is a mere ancient whisper in this torqued narrative: its odd violence feels true. Today & Tomorrow crashes through the windows of strip malls and paints the hypertrophic aisles with bristly-creepy hilarity.

Stacey Levine

#2. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

Jonathan Haidt

#3. Setting aside the issue of gender while highlighting the symmetry of bodies seemed indispensable in order to focus on the narrative of human beings in the making.

Alante Kavaite

#4. If I believe that abortion is wrong, and I want to convince you that it's wrong, there's no reason I should recount to you my personal narrative of how I came to believe this.

Jonathan Haidt

#5. I would have had the same narrative, regardless of the atmosphere and the restrictions.

Asghar Farhadi

#6. 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

#7. Simply put, the Internet undermines the ability of an institution to control its own narrative.

Jamais Cascio

#8. Although selfhood depends causally upon the existence of the brain, it amounts to something far more than the brain. This something is vague and intangible, and might best be described, I think, as a semi-fictional narrative that is in constant need of writing, editing, and preserving.

Neel Burton

#9. 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

#10. I write short, my words tight to the thread of the narrative.

Carmen Laforet

#11. I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative ... A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

E.L. Doctorow

#12. 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

#13. (Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.

Howard Kerr

#14. The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh.

Walter Brueggemann

#15. Yes, I know this narrative is crowded with beautiful women - Mrs. Pearson, Mrs. Maycott, Mrs. Lavien, Mrs. Bingham. We might form a cricket team of beautiful women. I cannot help it if they are the ones who excite my notice and so trouble myself to describe.

David Liss

#16. Nobody reads anymore in America. Reading has become the least effective delivery system for narrative. That's sad because prose is the means by which you can deliver very complicated, nuanced explanations of problems and possible solutions.

David Simon

#17. You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.

Kelly Link

#18. Moviemaking is a time machine: narrative spliced into fragments and reassembled into a constant present, the end of a story shot before the beginning, which is shot after the middle.

Steve Erickson

#19. I can pretty much spend an entire week talking about how the writing process works, to be honest! It can really vary from project to project and is often dependent on when you're brought on board, the genre, the platform and the narrative desires of the project.

Rhianna Pratchett

#20. Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can't.

Ray McKinnon

#21. Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now.

Tim Walker

#22. We are narrative creatures, and stories render the world apprehensible. Narrative tells us about the world we live in and our place within it.

Joseph Laycock

#23. I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

Brian Eno

#24. The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.

Peter Greenaway

#25. With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

Terry Eagleton

#26. With 'All Is Song,' I tried to construct a very traditional narrative that pulls no tricks.

Samantha Harvey

#27. Writers know - especially new writers - [that] a lot of it [creative process] is the prewriting stage, the talking, brainstorming, the narrative arc and the character sketches.

Jenna Bush

#28. My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#29. To be simple, I would say a story has to have a bit of narrative, if only "she says," and then enough of a creation of a different time and place to transport the reader.

Lydia Davis

#30. Discipline is aimed at formation for a specific end, and that end is determined by our founding narrative.

James K.A. Smith

#31. Our lives make awesome stories, especially if you don't get too attached to the thread of your own narrative.

Michelle Tea

#32. I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

Sarah Hall

#33. Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.

Karina Longworth

#34. I like the idea of building this wandering, epic narrative in a form that people don't expect epic narratives to appear.

Lucas Neff

#35. I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative.

Cate Blanchett

#36. 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

#37. I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

Ruth Rendell

#38. Yeah, episodic doesn't work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it's just narrative shit.

Don Roff

#39. Often, I'll read a script and the female character's an extension or serves some sort of purpose in terms of the male character's narrative and it just isn't fully formed. But they will be very beautiful. Whether a secretary or a doctor or a vet, they will be very beautiful.

Andrea Riseborough

#40. History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

Hilary Mantel

#41. The popular story is that America was built by immigrants and that, therefore, everything about immigration is good and leads to a more successful society. This narrative is so devoid of historical context that it should embarrass anyone beyond a second-grade education.

James Howard Kunstler

#42. We can think of the land bridge theory as a master narrative that for a couple of centuries has served multiple ideological agendas, lasting despite decades of growing evidence that casts doubt on the way the story has been perpetuated in textbooks and popular media.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#43. 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

#44. I'm handed a bunch of existing data. My job is to put that in the best narrative form. That is a puzzle I love to solve.

Hilary Liftin

#45. I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.

David Levering Lewis

#46. I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.

James Gray

#47. I have a way of making narrative sculpture, where first you make a text and out of that text you make objects. I start with a story and then I make sculpture from that story, it's just that the stories become more and more elaborate.

Matthew Barney

#48. The most effective way to defeat patriarchy is to defy and disown its self-legitimating narrative.

John Lamb Lash

#49. With my family, historical facts are subsidiary to narrative, and narrative must always show the narrator in the best light.

Stuart Rojstaczer

#50. If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

Tim Vine

#51. Data coming out our ears but we lack narrative.

Roy Sekoff

#52. I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

Sidney Sheldon

#53. It would be unthinkable to have a top-ten list of multiple narrative novels that doesn't include David Mitchell. 'Cloud Atlas' is the most obvious choice, but I have opted for Mitchell's slightly lesser known debut, 'Ghostwritten.'

Susan Barker

#54. What sets 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children' apart is Riggs's use of 'found' photographs as a spark of inspiration for the narrative. 'Found' describes art created from common objects that are not normally considered art.

Claire Cameron

#55. When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel ... you have to listen to it.

Jim Crace

#56. 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

#57. Music's the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There's always music. If I'm not playing it, I'm listening to it. With my writing ... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I'm working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

Charles De Lint

#58. There is a visual narrative that is implicitly understandable even when you don't understand the words and in a good comic, and they are hard to find, but good comics have parallel intertwined narratives.

Francoise Mouly

#59. Political leaders, who use the tools of mass propaganda to create a sense of faux intimacy with citizens, no longer need to be competent, sincere, or honest. They need only to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a personal narrative.

Chris Hedges

#60. 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

#61. I don't subscribe to the narrative that Africa is backward because of colonialism.

Mo Ibrahim

#62. Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames.

Sarah Hall

#63. I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

Garth Greenwell

#64. Media is extraordinarily important and is an extraordinarily powerful tool. There's a reason that the first things that a rebellion or revolt will take is the media. The story you transmit is the story that becomes a given, or the narrative of a country and people.

Dan Gilroy

#65. It was a war about fear, he thought, not figures on the ground. It was a war of narrative, a story of a war, and it grew in the telling.

Lavie Tidhar

#66. That's the definition of a mini-series. A mini-series is a show that has no continuing story or narrative elements between one group of episodes and another, so no, I wasn't surprised.

John Landgraf

#67. The audience wants a safety blanket. It's the storyteller's job to take that safety blanket and choke them with it until they experience a profound narrative orgasm.

Chuck Wendig

#68. But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way
a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in
separate backyards.

Lionel Shriver

#69. Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don't feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.

Junot Diaz

#70. If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

Darin Strauss

#71. Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design.

H.P. Lovecraft

#72. The lumpiness of 'The Good Lie's progression - from infancy to adulthood, and from ethnic horror to gentle social comedy to a heroic gift of freedom - proclaims the film's respect for facts and truths that can't be squeezed into a smooth narrative.

Richard Corliss

#73. the "attackers" - forming such a slick, seductive narrative that the average citizen - the "victim" - was almost an afterthought. "Bystander A" was glimpsed only in passing.

No One

#74. When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#75. 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

#76. The loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools ... It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

Meghan O'Rourke

#77. I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.

Matthea Harvey

#78. A shattered narrative is still a narrative. We can't escape it, it is what we are.

Jill Talbot

#79. If I weren't a theatre designer, I wouldn't be any other kind of designer. Design is interesting to me as it relates to narrative: the design has to support the narrative. Storytelling is the most important thing.

Christine Jones

#80. I read a lot growing up. It was kind of my comfort, you know; I loved it. I love story. I love narrative. I was academic. I wasn't particularly athletic. I didn't make the drill team. I didn't go out for sports.

Julianne Moore

#81. It's great that I can look up a fact instantly on my cellphone, but I miss the days in my room with a dog-eared, text-heavy paperback, immersed in the statistics of crime and punishment and lunacy, completely alone with the narrative of human depravity.

Russell Smith

#82. I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative.The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated ... All art to me is about problem solving.

Steven Soderbergh

#83. Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Zadie Smith

#84. If the great story of the last century was the conflict among various political ideologies-communism, fascism and democracy-then the great narrative of this century will be the changes wrought by astonishing scientific breakthroughs

Cynthia Tucker

#85. 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

#86. Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight ... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty.

Stephanie Mills

#87. 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

#88. Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.

Peter Greenaway

#89. You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don't agree with that narrative.

John Mackey

#90. First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

James McBride

#91. Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

Penelope Lively

#92. I don't teach narrative theory by itself anymore, but I kind of use it when critiquing student manuscripts. So, it works its way in there, whether I like it or not.

Rob Roberge

#93. The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.

Bruce Chatwin

#94. 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

#95. Why will people persist in reading strange meanings into the simplest of story? Is it not enough that a writer can entertain for a few hours with narrative without being suspected of 'significances' or symbolism or 'social trends'?

Margaret Mitchell

#96. I used my instincts. It's very easy to imagine how you'd feel, actually. I just had to tell the narrative.

Christopher Eccleston

#97. Being bound to one particular storyline such that one's narrative is rigid, does not imply the need to avoid formulating particular other kinds of possibilities. Rather, it involves being stuck in one self-limiting, self-reinforcing set of possibilities.

Elizabeth F. Howell

#98. I love narrative and sometimes I feel frustrated with stand-up.

Rachel Zucker

#99. I've never been interested in the convention of dialogue that facilitates narrative-it's always sort of bored me. I find myself zoning out just listening to cadences of voices and tonality and this sort of thing.

Rick Alverson

#100. [I]n every theology or system, every tradition or discursive practice, a story is being told whose peculiar force should be allowed priority over the abstract categories by which the critic might seek to reduce all narrative to the same bare framework of elementary functions.

David Bentley Hart