Quotes About Narrative

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

What the underdog socialist has forgotten is that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress.

Never underestimate the power of anyone's story... anyone's life.

People underestimate the complexity of comic books.

I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I'd be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn't good at science. I didn't have the discipline for it.

My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way.

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.

Social media makes it possible to go underneath a story, which sometimes abruptly ends.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.

Basically, all novelists should want to tell a story, and if they don't want to, they shouldn't be novelists. I think story-telling is important and underrated.

It did occur to me that certainly African-Americans are not underserved in picture books, but those books are almost all about specifically black experiences.

As a filmmaker, it's not my intent to trigger or shape national discourse. My task is to make as powerful and understandable a film as I can. What happens next is what happens next.

Understanding POV is essential, or ought to be.

Our understanding of history goes awry when we only tell one part of the story.

Maybe our telling of the story wasn't as clear as it should have been, but I don't think that's true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.

The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands.

Every era needs a genre through which it understands itself.

A lot of artists I like end up being queer. Or maybe it's a subconscious thing that you can identify of, like, 'Oh this person understands the nuances of the romantic narrative of a queer person, or the social narrative of a queer person.' And then you discover, lo and behold that they are a queer person.

I'm a big believer in making sure that action is not confusing and the audience understands what the characters are up to and what they're doing.

Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story.

I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.

The story of undocumented immigrants in this country is not just about undocumented immigrants. It's about the country as a whole, and it's about us being able to tell the truth about where we are with this issue because we haven't been telling the truth about where we are with this issue.

Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.

I tend to see my characters from inside and outside at once; this is a technique I use to retain a slight distance. It means my characters can act in unexpected ways on two axes: physical and mental. It isn't just, 'I thought this and then I did this,' which is the technique of the modern psychological novel.