Quotes About Narrative

History is the same story with different costumes.

And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.

'War and Peace' goes down a lot smoother than a Dan Brown novel, let me tell you.

It's so much more romantic to end a story up with a funeral than a wedding.

It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don't ever tell which is which.

Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.

Stan Bad guy can't win. It's a morality tale. One way or the other - he's gotta go down.

For what are most of our stories but cartoon versions of the past? Our personal history is the well-worn version of ourselves we've settled for, in which we come across as pitiful stick figures, "bored to death with ourselves and with the world," as don Juan said.

It was easy to see that I was recreating my painful history every time I talked about it.

A screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure.

To tell a story, you have to set up your characters, introduce the dramatic premise (what the story is about) and the dramatic situation (the circumstances surrounding the action), create obstacles for your characters to confront and overcome, then resolve the story.

A Plot Point is defined as any incident, episode, or event that hooks into the action and spins it around in another direction—

Story determines structure; structure doesn't determine story.

Modernism had two great wishes. It wanted its audience to be led toward a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed.

A lot has been written about Tony Perkins and myself and I figured, Let's get it straight. I had a relationship with Tony for two to three years, but those are only threads in the tapestry of my whole life.

She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

Stories are not like the real world; they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside.

World history is always the story of how "we" got to the here and now, so the shape of the narrative inherently depends on who we mean by "we" and what we mean by "here and now.

If you've a story, make sure it's a whole one, with details close to hand. It's the difference between a good lie and getting caught.