Quotes About Narrative

Winston has written four volumes about himself and called it 'World Crisis'.

Life is a handful of short stories, pretending to be a novel.

Science is uneasy with beginnings. Mythology is concerned above all with what happened "in the beginning". Its signature is "Once upon a time".

One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts.

He left the name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

No story ever looks as bad as the story you've just bought; no story ever looks as good as the story the other fellow just bought.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

But that is another story.

And thereby hangs a tale.

For seldom shall she hear a tale So sad, so tender, yet so true.

What so tedious as a twice-told tale?

I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me.

A tale never loses in the telling.

I will a round unvarnish'd tale deliver.

A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory and hopes other people haven't.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title.

Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad things you did do - well, that's memoirs.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If, in the first chapter, you say there is a gun hanging on the wall, you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.

A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

What do these children do without story books? Naftali asked. And Reb Zebulun replied: They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them. I couldn't live without them. Naftali said.

Every soldier in the course of time exists only in the breath of written word.