Quotes About Narrative

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

I don't like having characters as props. I never want a character to be a prop.

Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs.

Everybody wants a sensational story.

Withholding things in a story is no good if you aren't building to something substantial. It becomes foreplay without the main event, and no one wants that.

When you feel moved by the story, you want to tell that story.

I'm planning on how I want to tell my own story. I feel like my situation and my experiences are unique in some ways.

Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?

I don't write [screenplay character] biographies beforehand. I usually go in knowing some sequences: this is where I want to start, this is where I want to end.

When you're shooting 20-odd episodes in a season, the last thing you want is for each script to be the same tone.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

Clever's not enough to hold me - I want characters who are more than devices to be moved about for Effect.

I feel that if I establish the world or the premise from the first line, then I can get the reader to come with me where I want her to go.

Write backwards. Start from the feeling you want the audience to have at the end and then ask "How might that happen?" continually, until you have a beginning.

When I'm choosing things, there's a level of intelligence I want to peel off, whether it's written in terribly simple sentences, whether it's from the point of view of a dog, or a 15-year-old boy.

The only kind of film I want to write is a story where I can keep on seeing the stories play out. I'm a huge television fan, and I'm a huge continuing storyline fan.

I believe in storytelling, not story-selling. I want people to believe the characters are real. So I'm a realist.

I feel like in a conversation if things get said and then repeated, it sort of becomes inherently part of the narrative whether you want it to be or not.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

I've read Flowers in the Attic and The Other Side of Midnight and Go Ask Alice and I don't want to read any more books where the girl dies in the end.

Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.

Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice - A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.