Quotes About Narrative

When you're a writer and something difficult happens to you, one of the things involved in that is this emergence of narrative potential. And there's then a kind of self-consciousness about telling a story in which you suffered.

It's perfectly possible to spotlight Black joy over Black suffering. Setting the story in the past doesn't mean that Black folks do nothing but suffer.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.

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.

Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.

When people think about CNN today, they think about our television coverage, politics, and Donald Trump. And I get it; I'm not suggesting that's wrong. But I think there is a much bigger story going on at CNN.

No one is better placed or more philosophically suited than Obama to construct the new counter narrative as we go forward in our new New Deal. But many masters of the old universe, including quite possibly his chief economic adviser, can't recognize that the world has changed or should change.

I tend to tell stories that have a lot of momentum; it's not like 'and then months later...' I like things where the momentum of one action rolls into the next one so everything is the sum of that.

At Getty, I would have 20 different options for the same kind of event rather than focusing on the one image that will summarize the story.

Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie - 'Casablanca,' say - and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.

I painted myself into a corner by writing a whole book on this one period. The summer of 1927 came to an end, but nothing else did - all of these peoples' lives went on.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

I was not able to be the front forward of a soccer team - that is a way to make people super happy every Sunday. What I can do is tell stories and try to put my coin in that discussion.

I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

Beauty shouldn't be superficial and should come from within, and your eyes will tell the story.

If your attention is on superfluous aspects that are not part of the story, then you can't be concentrating on the human realities of the piece.

But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

That which we do is what we are. That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tall tale told by inattentive idealists.

All history is biography.

There is properly no history; only biography.

Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him.

All things are engaged in writing their history...Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.

What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?