Quotes About Narrative

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.

Television, nowadays, is like doing really long films.

It's not like some movies where you're following a bunch of different stories you can cut around. There was nowhere to cut to. It's these guys. We're not cutting back to anybody else.

I remember, often, when you tell people you're doing a book about board games, they think you're totally nuts. And that might be warranted. But I feel like if we can't get the story of Monopoly right... what hope is there for anything else?

I think I started out trying to be very objective about the flow of the play.

I write with as much objectivity as I can.

Objectivity is the purpose of documentary filmmakers.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important.

I'm a fisherman who likes to observe and tell yarns, and so I told stories about things that I knew about.

I've sort of always been obsessed with telling stories and making things up.