Quotes About Narrative

I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

My characters aren't chess pieces. I don't move them around some big board. I actually care about these fictitious people.

My songs used to be significantly more bizarre. I used to play a big electric piano and a loop pedal. I was really into Regina Spektor, and I liked her narrative lyrics that were quite off the wall. I used to layer things up and try and replicate what I'd been doing with my bedroom recordings.

There's no environment. Use your imagination. There's no fourth wall, whether it's the first time you've told this story about her life, or the sixth time.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

The first time someone stood up in front of the fire and told the story while illustrating it with shadows on the walls of the quarry, that was the birth of theater.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You're not just wandering around in the world.

I'm a storyteller - that's my chamber, that's my box. I'm always tryin' to give you the best story from our side of the table that you could really relate to quick. I understand where I wanna be at, but sometimes the production takes me where I need to go.

We're all humans. Any human can tell any human's story. I don't want to have this conversation about black film or white film anymore. I wanna have conversations about film.

I wanna go watch a story and a fight between a good guy and a bad guy.

I always wanted to make a film that had this sort of Chinese-box effect, in which you keep opening it up and opening it up, and finally at the end you're at the beginning.

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.

The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.

There's a special joy you get having a show on the air that people are interested in and wanting to know what happens next. You really want to enjoy that while you have it.

I believe what makes great television is wanting to watch particular characters.

When you're wanting to delve into something, it's the one thing that cable television lets you achieve, in a way where you can have long form. There are no defined chapters. There are scenes, but everything's not bookended by a Chevy commercial.

When you have 12 hours of storytelling, the cool thing about it is that you get to really leave people with question marks, but hopefully wanting to come back.

The real war will never get in the books.

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

'Triple Agent' is a different kind of read because it is, at its core, a pure narrative, the story of an intelligence operation that unfolds over the course of a year and then goes badly wrong. There's a lot of 'news' in the book, including an account of drone warfare that is as detailed, in my humble opinion, as any in the open-source arena.

Life is cold. People stay warm through the intimacy of a story.

I didn't like filtering the story through me, saying, 'Reader, you'll be safe with me. While it gets a little dangerous, it'll be okay because, after all, you're with me, because I'm a warm convivial voice. But let's be entertained by this horrible stuff.' I didn't like that.

Being outside is a loose theme on 'Paracosm.' Acoustic-sounding instruments have that warmth to them that is really important to communicate. It was really important for me to tell a story - my favorite records have a narrative feel.