Quotes About Narrative

With a focus on records and making money, you tend to miss a good story.

It's nice to see a story that centers around other couples, instead of having, you know, the sassy gay friend or the funny best friend or the assistant, which is just like these stereotypical roles that tend to be put in movies.

One reason we fell in love with television is we've seen so many movies and they tend to follow a very similar pattern.

I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.

In independent film you tend to have stories that involve more of a community, and the smaller characters are important to the story.

Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

Early on... I did notice that a lot of people had the tendency to do their own story starting out. I felt like I was never interested in that, and I wanted to tell stories of people who are very different.

When it's a rapper's album or a singer's album, there's a tendency to want a text-based or theme-based narrative.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

There's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

We are traumatized by growing up in a world that doesn't really accept us. Obviously, we've made great leaps and bounds, but I think there's a tendency to force a narrative onto queer people that once you come out... you have to be really happy and really successful and proud all the time.

I made 'Prozac Nation' necessary reading because I write necessarily. I tell my story because it is about everyone else: in 1993, people took pills to relieve the pain just like they do now, but it scared them; it doesn't any more, because talk is not cheap at all - it is tender.

The point really is that a writer tends to write a book that he or she tends to write. It's as simple as that. Of course, it's important to make a living and all that, but the main impulse as far as I'm concerned - and I'm sure as other writers are concerned - is to tell a story that I feel impelled by.

History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.

On the page, 'Gone Girl' was a literary game: a tennis match of alternating chapters from Nick and Amy, with the reader offering to take each character's side every few pages.

I read a handful of memoirs to get a sense of what the genre meant. I needed to learn the fundamentals of the craft. I had never written a word of narrative. What is a tense shift, what is point of view? I didn't know any of it.

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.

Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

I'm happy to have a physical part in 'High Tension,' in 'Hereafter,' and in a lot of French movies and Belgian movies. But its not by chance directors choose me for physical parts. I like to do that. I like to tell a story also with the body. It's important, because you can tell a lot of things.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a sword.

I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'

Whether politicians are dealing with complex policy problems or trying to communicate with the electorate, it makes sense to establish a clear, long term narrative underpinned by forward-looking policies to deliver on its vision.