Quotes About Narrative

I feel my story has been exercised very thoroughly and very frequently.

We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren't enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase - long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.

I try to always go for something... very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.

How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?

Stories keep us alive inside.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

While someone with the first person knowledge is still alive, while records are still available, while relatives of witnesses can come forward, the stories must be told.

I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.

histories. Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) historian Jean O'Brien names this practice of writing Indians out of existence "firsting and lasting." All over the continent, local histories, monuments, and signage narrate the story of first settlement: the founder(s), the first school, first dwelling, first everything, as if there had never been occupants who thrived in those places before Euro-Americans.

People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.

Referring to an event in an untold story is a powerful technique rarely used.

battle the clock with a set of focusing questions: Why does the story matter? What's the point? Why is the story being told? What does the story say about life, the world, the times we live in?

Every great narrative contains its end in its beginning and its beginning in its end,

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

A story is what remains when you leave out most of the action.

A frightening thought had been growing in me. I'd always assumed that I was the central character in my own story but now it occurred to me that I might in fact be only a minor character in someone else's.

I believed the stories he told were true for him,

You listen well and that makes you a good keeper of stories. I am sure that all my memories are safe with you" -Baba

I have just described an unforgettable event in my life, and yet I hardly ever get a chance to speak of it. It doesn't fit the framework of social discourse.

I used to think that after the war I would have something of interest and significance to tell. A contribution. But people didn't want to hear about it, or if they did listen, it was in a certain pose, an attitude assumed for this special occasion; it was not a partners in a conversation, but as if I had imposed on them and they were graciously indulging me.

Wars, and hence the memories of wars, are owned by the male species. And facism is a decidely male property, whether you were for or against it. Besides, women have no past, or aren't supposed to have one. A man can have an interesting past, a woman only indecent.

She smiled. "Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.