Quotes About Narrative

Stacy Schiff

To me, Writing is Fun. It doesn't matter what you're writing, as long as you can tell a story.

To my way of thinking, whether it's a superhero movie or a romance or a comedy or whatever, the most important thing is you've got to care about the characters. You've got to understand the characters and you've got to be interested. If the characters are interesting, you're half-way home.

One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could build anything beginning with the letter 'n'.

Nosotros contamos la verdad por cuanto en los cuentos siempre triunfa la verdad.

Why do children learn about Columbus, the discoverer of America who discovered it only by accident, on his way to India, while there's not one word about the discoverer of the pickle? We could have managed without America, sooner or later America would have discovered itself, but not the pickle, and then there would have been nothing to sit on our plate beside a roast beef sandwich.

If you have a rifle, hanging on the wall in the first act, it should fire in the last act".

The individual stories of saltwater slavery form the antithesis of historical narrative, for they feature not an evolving plot of change over time, but rather a tale of endless repetition that allows no temporal progression. Every protagonist was a pioneer, blazing a trail on the same ground traveled by predecessors in saltwater slavery, but without the benefit of historical memory. It is a narrative in which time seems to stand still.

How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America by Rick Fields (Boston: Shambhala, 1981), and my The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western

When my self is no longer the all-consuming preoccupation it once was, when I see it as one narrative thread among myriad others, when I understand it to be as contingent and transient as anything else, then the barrier that separates "me" from "not me" begins to crumble. The conviction of being a closed cell of self is not only delusive but anesthetic. It numbs me to the suffering of the world.

Not everyone has a sob story, Charlie, and even if they do, it's no excuse." That

It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

Of course the Greeks were not the only people to weave a tapestry of legends and lore out of the puzzling fabric of existence.

Myth can be a kind of human algebra, which makes it easier to manipulate truth about ourselves.

This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.

Given the intervention of the gods and other magical and supernatural happenings, I have—as mentioned in the Introduction that you so wisely skipped—thought it best to tell the story of the war and its aftermath without attempting to dot every sequential iota or cross every chronological tau.

So much of science proceeds by telling stories.

We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.