Quotes About Narrative

The Bible is basically and overall a narrative - an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative.

Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Never forget that work is the story we tell ourselves about money.

It is not that the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. It is that the heroine is not convinced she is the heroine or that the story is true. The heroine knows that New York is just a city-- just a place to live. And, like any other place, it demands that you make your own story.

We save up the events of our days to tell our friends, feeling that until our affairs have been told they haven't quite happened: Thus do our friends confirm our lives.

The past depends on the angle from which it is seen and from which it has been lived

Another mistake is presenting too much background information, and doing so in the first few pages. Writers should begin their stories with the event that kicks off the story, and then spoon-feed us background information only when it's needed to understand what's going on." [ A Conversation with Evan Marshall ( Writers Write , September 1999)]

For me, acting was a way of releasing all of this stuff that I had inside - and a way for me to tell the stories of the people I knew, so that their spirit could live through me.

Difficulty is our most reliable narrative engine.

One of the things that all religions have is a narrative of doomsday. There has to be some kind of overarching fear of the future. If there wasn't, none of the religions could invoke this important thing - that science has no evidence of, by the way - called free will.

Any show that kind of relish the damage of its main character without really investigating what that damage does, where it's from or what it means, is a show I think needs to be taken down a peg.

I like stories, and I really like words. So I like stories that rely on dialogue.

I like having my own story remain my story.

And that if you become a star, people are going to go to see you. If you remain an actor, they're going to go and see the story you're in.

Sherpa were always involved with the setting of the lines, but they never got the platform to tell any story, I think. And so these people have always remained in the shadow. But now obviously with the internet, the whole platform and everything, people can hold a light these days.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.

I look for what responsibility the character has in telling the story. If you remove the role from the story, can you still tell the story properly? And if the answer is no, then I'm interested.

I know little stories that happen to people around me, and I can repeat that in a way that has some color.

The repetition of the victimhood narrative is really poisonous for young people because they hear it and believe it.

If you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works, you're a hack.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

I have nothing to do with the selection of stories. I'm the reporter.