Quotes About Narrative

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

I usually talk about clothes in terms of a story rather than a colour.

In terms of script, Bollywood should learn from South Indian scripts. Not talking about the fights and action, I am talking about the drama bit.

I always say the classier cousin of 'Anchorman' is 'Mad Men,' because when you really look at it, why do people really love Don Draper in 'Mad Men?' He's just a terrible guy. But we know why he's terrible, and I think that's really key to why you can be sympathetic to a character.

I was not a particularly brave child, I think, because I had a narrative mind, because my mind automatically went to any terrible thing that could happen.

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.

I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.

If you can actually get someone to sit on the edge of their seat and feel nervous if there's a knock at the door, then you've done something pretty terrific as a writer.

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

I'm going to try to tell stories and let each tale skate its own way into dark or light territory as the needs of the story steer me.

Every time I tell my story, I feel that I am taking some power away from the terrorists.

Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the 'radicalization' narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.

For many terrorists, carrying out an attack allowed them to become the heroes of their own story.

It's always important not to fall for the narrative of the terrorists. If you want to fight for getting a normal life back, you also have to participate.

Once we truly grasp the message of the 'New Testament', it is impossible to read the 'Old Testament' again without seeing Christ on every page, in every story, foreshadowed or anticipated in every event and narrative.

I know that I have to give testimony about all the things I lived, but I need time.

The best bit about having a collaborator is plot. Plot is quite hard to get right. It is a testing intellectual exercise that feels quite different to being in the flow of voice or characterisation. I like having someone to construct a plot with.

It is the gift of stories that most repays life among settled people.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers -declared or undeclared - will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through.

The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it's all in the story.