Quotes About Narrative

It's tricky to take a book of short stories and turn it into a feature film.

Part of what's so tricky in a film that's two hours long is how many themes can you effectively explore.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

Sequels are always tricky.

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

When I started, I was an artist; I wanted to be an artist. I became an actor almost by accident. I acted for fifteen years and tried to produce. I looked for stories that were the story beneath the story that you thought you knew, like 'The Candidate'.

You know, when I did 'American Idol' the three times, I tried to tell these kids you have to tell the story of the lyric.

Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.

Most games end up with quite caricature scripts because they are just here to serve the game-play mechanics but not to trigger any emotional response.

There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.

'Kiss Land' is the story after 'Trilogy'; it's pretty much the second chapter of my life. The narrative takes place after my first flight; it's very foreign, very Asian-inspired. When people ask me, 'Why Japan?' I simply tell them it's the furthest I've ever been from home. It really is a different planet.

If you make a trilogy, the whole point is to get to that third chapter, and the third chapter is what justifies what's come before.

When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.

I wish we could all have a telling room, a place where we go to tell our stories and listen to the stories of others; in our culture, the telling room might be around the dinner table or in the car on a long trip.

How do you tell a story that you're a part of without it being a big ego trip?

It sounds trite, but I like telling stories.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

The desire to hear a story, and a story well told, triumphs over Internet, film and television sometimes.

Rawn did her own thing in her own way. She cast the female gaze on a genre heavy with all-male quest fellowships, trophy females, and the occasional Smurfette. Her world was male-dominated and highly patriarchal, but she populated it with notable numbers of well-drawn female characters.

It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve - a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.

The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it's there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn't dead.

With 'Holes' I was troubled that there weren't very many female characters. I tried to put them in where I could. But the setting didn't lend itself to girls.

I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.