Quotes About Narrative

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.

Belief is the enemy of a storyteller

Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany.

You still cling to romantic notions about writing, that you'll be able to figure things out, that you will understand life, as if life is understandable, as if art is understandable. When has writing explained anything to you? Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative.

Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.

You wanted people's stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.

Listen. Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.

Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology.

Writing one's story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

In the grand scheme of stories, he was nothing, almost an unmentionable, for he was not an odd character or an interesting one. He was a thread, one of many, without which the tapestry would crumble, the yarn fray, and the tale unravel.

Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us. My father and I may have shared numerous experiences, but, as I was constantly finding out, we rarely shared their stories; we din't know how to listen to one another.

Memory, memoir, autobiography - lies, lies, all lies.

When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.

I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn't, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.

It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.

Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.

And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did you know that you'd got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you.

It was her own capacity for story telling that made her see her own hand in what happened around her.

Benim aç?mdan, kad?nlarla erkeklerin öyküsü, son tahlilde bir savaÅŸ öyküsüdür.

I said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion.