Quotes About Narrative

We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.

History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

If you only hear one side of the story, at some point, you have to question who the writer is.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

Studying psychology is fun because you're always looking for the same things I think a writer should be looking for, which is the story behind the story.

I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That's what I want to do.

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

The quality I appreciated most about Grafton was her loyalty. She stuck with 'Kinsey Millhone' and the alphabet series conceit for her entire career but did not allow herself to stagnate as a writer. Kinsey's first-person narrative gradually made room for other, third-person perspectives.

My favorite writer is Alice Munro. It's simply amazing how well she captures entire lifetimes in a single short story.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

In the TV world, we are seeing a lot more power going to the writer. I sense it is a writer's medium.

And so, when I was a young writer I always worked hard on imagery, and I knew that the roots of imagery were the senses - and that if my readers could feel, taste and see what I was talking about, I would be able to tell them a story.

As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'

Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer.

I love Sherlock Holmes, but I love any of these old stories where the writer was paid by the word, so the adventures just continue forever. They are almost like they were meant to be read out loud.

I think that, as a writer, while it's your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.

I'm not good at narrative; I'm really a gag writer, and that comes from being in the newspaper comic strip world for a while in college. What I do is I just write tons of jokes, then I sort them out in terms of quality and then pick the best of the jokes and then try to form them into a plot. If I get a good theme going, I feel lucky.