Quotes About Narrative

It's kind of a subversive act to tell a story of a woman past a certain age, to develop a four-hour movie based on a marriage and a story of two people past middle age.

When I'm writing, I won't know whodunnit until maybe two thirds of the way through. Until then, I know as little as my detective. I just make it up as I go along. It's nerve-wracking, actually. You'll be half through and not know your conclusion. You worry one of these days the ending won't come. I'll be left with only two-thirds of a novel.

You have considerable choice in how you end your fiction. For all stories, the basic rule is the same: Choose the type of ending that best suits what's gone before.

I'd love to do action-y types of films; you know, as long as they're good stories.

I feel like there are probably more films about white male friendships than almost any other types of movies.

There are many different ways of telling an interactive story, I think. I don't think there's a right one and a wrong one. There are different games telling different types of stories in different ways.

My work looks like a comic book in form, but it's not a typical comic book in content. I write autobiographical stuff.

I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.

A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.

I think a script is great when it starts with the structure and works with the structure without falling into the typical three-act system in which the audience is ahead of the movie. I hate that, but that is like 99% of what I read.

'Strong Island' is not your typical true-crime film. It's not actually about the uncovering of evidence or following leads that hadn't been seen before or any of that stuff.

While there is a typical introduction song for the hero, there are songs that represent each phase of the characters' journey.

My songs are my stories... good, bad, ugly, beautiful.

I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine - not Russia - attacked us in 2016.

I think that, anybody with a strong will to tell a story, then that is fantastic. I think it's fantastic. I think sometimes people have what I'll call an ulterior motive with a story.

The genre of narrative business books that I love so much - the ones that have a you-are-there quality - was invented, or so it is said, in 1982 by David McClintick, who wrote 'Indecent Exposure,' a rollicking good read about a Hollywood scandal and the ultimate boardroom power struggle at Columbia Pictures.

Our biggest challenge is always story. The story is the ultimate thing you try to tackle.

Writing plays supplied for me everything that painting didn't, which is the ability to tell stories in real time, in a real space, in three dimensions, in flesh and blood. I realized I had been trying to cram all this narrative into my paintings, but ultimately painting was a static medium. So it just opened up this whole new door.

So ultimately I am looking for a story that has some value and is important and is entertaining.

You'd be surprised how hard it is getting the human emotional arc in a script to work. Ultimately a director stands and falls by their ability to do that.

I will throw all my best efforts into it, my thoughts and political observations, but ultimately I want to create a narrative that keeps you turning the pages and leaves you with a sense that this thing has a reason for being there.

It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.

For all the import and message of 'The Iliad,' it's ultimately a story that's meant to be heard, and the person hearing 'The Iliad' determines what it means.