Quotes About Narrative

We're talking about, essentially, the Roman historians, who wrote Cleopatra into the story mostly so that they could talk about the rise of Rome. And that is one of the problems, of course, in recounting her life. She's only ever apparent to us when there is a Roman in the room, or when her story intersects with the rise of Rome.

What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

That's what we do in WWE: we tell stories.

One of the only things that bothered me with WWE and being on every week was blowing off so many great storylines so fast, just out of necessity.

Videogames tell stories on good and evil, and so does the WWE, so that's the core of both things.

I believe that the Kane/Undertaker story, if you look at epic storytelling like Greek mythology, that is what it is. It is the best piece of epic storytelling that the WWE has ever done.

It was acting, and WWE is the longest-running weekly episodic program in television. Sure, there are story lines that are better than others.

People always said during the Monday Night Wars that the only way we were able to compete was due to a large checkbook and deep pockets. That's not very true at all. That is a false narrative designed to shape history. WWE had significant advantages over WCW and vice versa.

Professional wrestling... is no different than a Broadway play except that in a Broadway play, actors are using dialogue to tell a story and establish their characters, while in WWE, they're using a physical dialogue to tell their story and build their characters. That's a very unique art; it really is.

That's what we do in the WWE: we tell stories; we're characters. We go into the ring, and my character is telling a story in the ring against another character.

Myself, there's people saying, 'He'll never find himself in the halls of WWE.' It's a narrative that's fueled more by secondhand fan myth than what people feel.

Plot is a framework on which to drape other things. So once that's working, I can just let it go and do all the stuff that I love - 'Trojan horse' it. There are so many great YA heroines, and that's fantastic, but what about the emotionally complex boy out there? That's who I tend to write about.

One of the things that defines YA is a really strong narrative. Adults love YA because, at the end of the day, they're good stories and page-turners. The other element is emotion. The teen years are a very emotional and intense time, and I think it's a time we that we can all relate to and remember.

Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's 'Time's Arrow' wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

'Atlanta' is Wild West-y - every corner of the city is trying to get by under its own rules. There's no single narrative. At the outer edges, the overgrown parking lots and project blocks, the city is a few yards away from apocalypse, and if you slow down, it could engulf you.

I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.

Yeah, I don't necessarily like endings that contrive an artificial moment of completion.

In terms of a narrative nonfiction book, when you're describing scenes that you have multiple sources for, and that you have differing sources for, and you decide to choose a path that puts all that information together, well yeah, there's definitely going to be a little bit of the author in that. But there's nothing wrong with that.

People are always yearning for a bigger story to be part of, it's not enough to live our own private lives.

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.