Quotes About Narrative

Genes are like the story, and DNA is the language that the story is written in.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

I believe that history is written by the victors, but what about the vanquished? They also have a story to tell.

The earliest stories in Genesis were not written to tell primeval history. They were written to tell readers about themselves and about God.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories. It begins, 'In the beginning God created Heaven.' If I had written these words, I wouldn't have written anything else; it's just enough.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm a character being written, or if I'm writing myself.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that's what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

First and foremost, telling historical stories is very tricky because it is something that is known. It is not like you can tell a lie or change something that is written in black and white.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

All stories I write are compulsive. Anything I've ever written was because I don't have a choice. I write stories because I can't wait to tell it, I can't wait to see how it ends.

The picture alone, without the written word, leaves half the story untold.

When television gets in trouble is when it forgets that it all begins with the written word.

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

In Victorian fiction, there would be a chapter at the end devoted to righting all of the wrongs. I thought to right all of the wrongs would be too glib. I thought it would be better to lull the reader into thinking that is the way it would work, but then not to do that.

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

As I wrote, I found that Aibileen had some things to say that really weren't in her character. She was older, soft-spoken, and she started showing some attitude.

'Game of Thrones' is the broadest of narratives. I don't know if anyone in the U.S. has done a story on such a large scale before, both in terms of what George R.R. Martin wrote and what's on the show.

I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.

I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.

Every good story needs a hero. Back when I wrote 'The Search,' that hero was Google - the book wasn't about Google alone, but Google's narrative worked to drive the entire story.

'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.