Quotes About Narrative

'All Quiet on the Western Front' is just sort of there isn't it? Every single trope of the First World War, and anti-war writing in general, is in there.

We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.

To those who don't know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War.

To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War Two.

We've talked and written about the World War so much that it has almost been purged off. The bitterness is gone. The drama came to an end and it is history.

If you ask the people in Europe who won World War II, they don't say the Allies; they say the United States won the war and saved the world.

The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.

I think nothing has been filmed as much as World War II.

A lotta stuff has been written about me that I never said. Stories that were lies. One guy wrote that young as I was during World War II, I actually got a rifle and fought off the Germans. Which is ridiculous, insane. I was just six.

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle.

My writing could be the most beautiful or important piece of prose, but it means nothing if it's boring, if people aren't listening or reading. I think transporting someone, putting them in a story for a few hours, taking them out of their worlds, is what I always strive to do.

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

My definition of an adventure game is an interactive story set with puzzles and obstacles to solve and worlds to explore.

It is perhaps both a blessing and a curse that fictional worlds spring into my mind nearly fully formed and it takes quite a while to sift through everything to find the story.

We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had.

Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.

My process seems to be unusual in the sense that I don't create worlds before characters. With me, character is king.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

Books about technology start-ups have a pattern. First, there's the grand vision of the founders, then the heroic journey of producing new worlds from all-night coding and caffeine abuse, and finally, the grand finale: immense wealth and secular sainthood. Let's call it the Jobs Narrative.

I like to create characters and worlds, and there's nothing like telling your own stories.

I have a worm's eye view and a bird's eye view simultaneously and it's immensely helpful to understand what is happening on the shop floor when you are harnessing many talents and telling an intimate story on a large scale.

I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.

Crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going to be worried about her brother and sister; she will be making a living while bringing up kids.

The two have to go hand in hand - the atmosphere and the music. I actually get rather worried if I can't see the music first. There always needs to be a mood, a feeling, a story, even if it is abstract. There's got to be a narrative to guide things before they're even created.