Quotes About Narrative

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

We gotta wait for your dad to park the car. Then we gotta hear the Epic Saga.

Fable has strong shoulders that carry far more truth than fact can.

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

But in the genealogical plots of Dickens, which manage, against all the odds, and through extravagantly implausible coincidences, to work themselves out against the hostile background of the vast London crowds, we can identify the same narratological problem to which Joyce and Proust seek a queer structural solution: the competition for control of the narrative between the genealogical family and alternative forms of human connections.

When you just dump information onto your audience, you are not really making an impact on their hearts and minds. But, when you start telling a story, a magic thing happens: They instantly give you their full attention.

The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever...

What, in the end, can we say about Rabbi Akiva? Throughout this book I have tried to keep in mind the words of the novelist Margaret Atwood in the epigraph: "There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

There is something very affirming about the idea that the narrative is the big thing, and it is not clear if it is good or bad, or if it is moving in a good or bad direction. It's just moving. You have to draw meaning from the whole.

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn't just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.

The way I write isn't visually or stylistically dependent. It's usually one character that starts talking, and that points me where the story's going.

I think what happens normally in a narrative film is that the camera constructs the reality.

Every reality show plot pales in comparison to our history.

Baseball ultimately is a drama without a script. It's the original reality TV.

I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.

For 'Game of Thrones,' I realized immediately that it was about the characters.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

Our cinema is coming of age, and people are realizing we need to tell different stories differently and in fresh manner and not just do formula stuff and serve it to the audience.

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.

The problem that I think is reasonable to assert about Fox and its coverage is that they make up stories out of whole cloth and then make a big deal out of them.

Before you can challenge a received narrative about the past, you should be expert in its established contours.

I can't stand recipes that don't have background.