Quotes About Narrative

Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories.

Tout concourt à I'histoire, tout est I'histoire, meme les romans qui semblent ne se rattacher en rien aux situations politiques qui les voient eclore.

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved.

We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer's goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.

that's really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.

A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we're saying that it responds alertly to itself.

We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments.

In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We'd better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.

What a story is "about" is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring. So: What do you care about in this story, so far? It's Marya.

Halfway through the second paragraph, we find that the resisting element within the narrative voice belongs to one Marya Vasilyevna, who, failing to be moved by springtime, appears in the cart at the sound of her name.

We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.

The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

What transforms an anecdote into a story is escalation. Or, we might say: when escalation is suddenly felt to be occurring, it is a sign that our anecdote is transforming into a story.

A story means, at the highest level, not by what it concludes but by how it proceeds.

What transforms an anecdote into a story is escalation.

Ya bir devam? vard?r,ya da yoktur.. Ya anlat?labilecek bir devam? vard?r,ya da yoktur.

The Monk then undertook to tell us the history of the world -- an over-ambitious project, I thought, but it passed the time.

What happened to-day, a narrative

There must be a story within him/her that wants to come out. That's the reason why 'Dil Chahta Hai,' 'Lagaan,' and 'Rang De Basanti' worked so well: Ashutosh, Farhan, and Rakesh had a story inside them. It's very important that the director should have the fire in the belly to tell the story.

We got kind of into a rhythm at 'Parks' because there were so many characters that we had an A story, a B story, and a C story just about every episode. So by the middle of that show's run, we always had three stories, and it worked really well.

Tragedy is a great storytelling form. It worked extremely well for Shakespeare. It worked extremely well for Jim Cameron with 'Titanic.'

This is a great continent. I went to primary school on this continent, secondary school, university. I've worked on this continent, and I think that it's a great disservice that, for whatever reason, people have usurped an imagery of Africa that is absolutely incorrect.

I didn't care about a Dean Malenko; I'm sorry, Dean, I actually like you, you're a nice guy personally, amazing worker in the ring, but it's just boring if you can't tell me a story?