Quotes About Narrative

The story might sound like common gossip when told by another person, but in the mouth of a storyteller, gossip was art.

In a sense, you have to grab your reader by the lapels and say, 'I must tell you this story, or I will die!

You have to remember, the history the powers-that-be feed you always excludes what they managed to bury. Or whom.

You've got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.

Memory, the whole lying opera of it.

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive... from Crow and Weasel

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising.

The problem comes when readers take these two accounts and combine them into one overarching account, in which Jesus says, does, and experiences everything narrated in both Gospels. When that is done, the messages of both Mark and Luke get completely lost and glossed over. Jesus is no longer in deep agony, as in Mark (since he is confident as in Luke), and he is no longer calm and in control as in Luke (since he is in despair as in Mark). He is somehow all things at once. Also

If Jesus really were equal with God from "the beginning," before he came to earth, and he knew it, then surely the Synoptic Gospels would have mentioned this at some point. Wouldn't that be the most important thing about him? But no, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke he does not talk about himself in this way—nor does he do so in their sources (Q, M, and L).

In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told.

To approach the stories in this way is to rob each author of his own integrity as an author and to deprive him of the meaning that he conveys in his story.

Jesus's half brother James, who in this account is the son of Joseph from a previous marriage.

The widespread notion that stories never should be changed but should be repeated without alteration every time is an innovation of modern written cultures.

Well then, I'm going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who's been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories - those with beginnings, middles, and ends - are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story.

The only two useful art forms are religion and stories.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world--

if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.

Maybe Shooter was a writer. He fulfilled both of the main requirements: he told a tale you wanted to hear to the end, even if you had a pretty good idea what the end was going to be, and he was so full of shit he squeaked.

Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times.

Are you a storyteller, Thomas Covenant?" Absently he replied, "I was, once.

a story is ready when it falls from your face

Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

that all-important first impression, a narrative that is totally within your control, so work it to your advantage.