Quotes About Narrative

I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'

I've always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don't stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it's all happening at once.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

For film and theater, you know how the story starts; you know how the story ends. With TV, you don't. It's literally like living real life in character.

An opening statement is like a guide or a road map. It's a very delicate thing.

I don't think it's necessary to shout if you have a good story. But I also don't think you should shy away from being bold in the statement that you're making.

It's still a political statement to stand on stage as a person of color and be excellent. We still need those images to combat the narrative we're often fed - as someone innately inferior or inexorably linked with lack.

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.

You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people.

Statistics are easy to remove ourselves from. A story, you are implicated in, and you have to choose what side you are going to be on.

There's this narrative that is entrenched in some of the professions that there's this mysterious thing called 'socioeconomic status' that is immutably correlated with health. And it isn't.

Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters.

As a film composer I deal with short bursts of musical ideas that are defined to a large extent by what's happening on the screen, by not only narrative and action, but staying out of the way of dialogue, sound effects.

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

'Eraserhead' is a weird, horrible nightmare, and it doesn't narratively make sense. Stuff's happening, but you honestly feel like you're in a nightmare, and it has such disturbing imagery that it stays with you forever once you've seen it.

I don't want to steal anybody's story. I very much want to use the stories that I hear to get lost in my mind, to tell a larger story.

Every single time I step on stage or on screen, I am contributing to a culture in which there's a dearth of people representing folks that look like me, or that have our context.

I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.

Every dramatist will tell you that they know deep down what happened in the course of making that film and to what degree they took steps that were convenient and to what degree they took steps in telling their story that were dishonest. You know in your heart of hearts.

The interest in character-driven content over narrative-driven ditto is increasing; that's why television steps in. Personally, I love it, since psychology and character, really, are my beacons.

I don't want to ever tell a stereotype joke for the sake of it. I'm going to tell the story that I feel is true.

I am the head of development at Giant Spacekat, a Boston-based studio that's an industry leader in making games for women. We are passionate about creating narrative games for the avalanche of new consumers who don't fit the old gamer stereotype.

we have a penchant to pay close attention to information that comes to us in the form of a story or personal account.

The critical question is whether preachers are supposed to help people "find their stories in the Bible" or are supposed to call the hearers, as George Lindbeck has suggested, to "make the story of the Bible their story."45