Quotes About Narrative

Politics always change. Stories never do.

Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story

Maybe, in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees.

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

One of the great things about tales is how fast time may pass when not much of note is happening. Real life is never that way, and it is probably a good thing.

Fiction is a lie. And GOOD fiction is the truth inside the lie.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.

But storytelling always changes time. At least it does in my world.

Stories take a person away. If they're good ones, that is.

We all write fiction when we write about the past.

Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.

Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do—to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a small-scale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and the narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.

Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world.

Story is something happening to someone you have been led to care about.

Even after a thousand pages we don't want to leave the world the writer has made for us, or the make-believe people who live there.

The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don't get carried away with the rest. Life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.

la buena literatura podía ser embriagadora sin renunciar al hilo conductor de las ideas.

How beautiful would history have been if it could be written beforehand and then acted out like drama!

We are our stories.

No man can walk out from his own story.