Quotes About Narrative

Because liking the person we go on a journey with is the single most important element in drawing us into the story.

Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

Fictional characters come trailing many cognitive puzzles.

There is a saying in sales: Facts tell, but stories sell. This is easy to remember because it rhymes, but it's not entirely true. Stories don't necessarily sell. What they do is connect.

One reason to fashion a story is to lift a grudge.

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.

Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

The main hero of this culture is a criminal, a murderer. The crime story is the only contemporary narrative that is able to capture the collective imagination... The outlaw is truly sovereign and even sacred because he or she represents not (ordinary) life but death in a society for which death is the absolute master... Of course, such killers who kill only to become sovereign and maybe even sacral are rare (mostly to be found in Dostoyevsky's novels).

The business of the historian is with the truth of things, but he is too much under temptation to make his history interesting, to be always able to reject a fine story.

Storytelling is storytelling no matter what your medium is. And the language of film is also the same. You're still using close ups and medium shots and long shots. You're still trying to introduce the audience to a character and get then to care.

Telling stories about your memory of what happened may be entertaining for a while, but if that is all you can do it gets boring pretty fast.

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010

Bezos announced that employees could no longer use such corporate crutches and would have to write their presentations in prose, in what he called narratives.

The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories.

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

Wilde was not a fan of pundits. They came on television to either confirm your narrative or piss you off, and either way, that wasn't healthy for anyone.

Recorded history's version does not coincide with the truth, but these are the facts, because they were passed down by word of mouth through the years, and every Maycombian knows them.

I waited, on tenterhooks, for Uncle Jack to tell Atticus my side of it.

As Kipling said, that's another story...

The novel must tell a story.

Oh dear me, yes. The novel must tell a story.

Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. It is all-the good and the bad-carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.

Everything is stories, and stories is everything