Quotes About Narrative

We listened agog, because she was a wonderful storyteller. She could paint pictures in your head with words, and she could touch the heart of you too.

Dont pretend. Tell you tale. Speak with your own voice. We are what we write, I think, even more than we are what we read.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

Death means you are in the third person.

Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.

A well-told lie is worth a thousand facts

No story is ever told just once.

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others

Telling a story is like trying to eat grapes with a fork. It's always trying to get away from you. And if you're a good author, and you've challenged yourself, and you're telling big stories, there's more and more that's trying to get away from you simultaneously.

With 'Sin Nombre,' there are parts that I wish were longer. And with 'Jane Eyre' especially, there were parts that I had to compress that I thought it would have been really nice to spend more time with - to spend with the characters.

Every single immigrant is part of a larger history that needs to be communicated in all its ambivalences and complexities.

When I'm working in finite serials, I always think in terms of the entire book rather than the individual episode because, by far, the vaster sector of the project's lifespan will be in complete book form rather than the singles.

I don't want to put 12 singles on an album. I want to make a story, a little movie.

I'm someone who has a singular goal in making films: I want to tell a story. There are certain stories that I want to tell.

Novels are political because in them, we try to identify with people who are not like us. And, in that sense, I like the first-person singular because I have to imitate accurately the voice of someone who is not like me. The third-person singular gives me an authority over a character.

It's so easy to fetishise the dead. We rose-tint or villainise them, and so often in the retelling they are saints or sinners, rather than flawed humans muddling along like the rest of us.

That's one of the reasons why 'Lost' has to end: because we can't sit around and envision, 'What is the flashback for Jack in year nine?' It doesn't realistically exist.

Most e-commerce sites focus on a product lists, they don't have stories. They don't tell you why the products are made or a reason you'd want to have this in your home.

When I'm writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we're cavemen, we're sitting around the fire, and I'm telling you stories. If I bore you, you're probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

When my lady and I sit down and watch TV, I find she gets annoyed at characters because they don't do what she would do in the situation. I'm always like, 'Well, she has to do that because that's what the story is.'

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

I feel like there's already a written narrative going on everywhere. All the different situations and realities you're in, like words floating by. It's something that I didn't start thinking about until recently, but you can hitch that ride, that narrative that's already been created. You just have to read it and write it down.

Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size.