Quotes About Narrative

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told.

Es esta una de las torturas y desgracias de la vida: cuando son incapaces nuestros amigos de terminar sus cuentos.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

Tâchons de croire que la vie est un objet solide, un globe que nous pouvons faire tourner sous nos doigts. Tâchons de croire qu'on peut faire un récit simple et logique, en finir avec l'amour, par exemple, et passer au chapitre suivant.

The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together

for there was neither pride nor regret in his tone; indeed it kept its level note, as of one who tells a tale so well known that the words have been rubbed smooth of meaning.

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction.

But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories.

But if there are no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning?

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.

When, on a Sunday evening in May 1876, Anna throws herself under the freight train, she has existed more than four years since the beginning of the novel, but in the case of the Lyovins, during the same period, 1872 to 1876, hardly three years have elapsed. It is the best example of relativity in literature that is known to me.

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.

Sana anlat?lan?n asl?nda üç aÅŸamal? olduÄŸunu unutma; önce anlatan taraf?ndan biçimlendiÄŸini, sonra dinleyen taraf?ndan yeniden biçimlendiÄŸini, öyküdeki ölmüÅŸ adam?n her ikisinden de saklad??? ÅŸeyler olduÄŸunu.

An author's fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained?

In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine.

To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, my Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man in the tale.

That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.

This then is my story