Quotes About Narrative

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

Obviously, you're always happy when you can tell a story completely from beginning to end and tell it in a satisfying way, where you're able to make yourself happy and make the audience happy.

The events with Henry III happened, obviously the way it happened, liberties were taken.

My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.) I will say that having read the best and worst of novels for many years, which is, to remind you, part of a good devil's education, I know by now that not even a loyal reader can stay true to an author who is ready to leave his narrative for an apparently unrelated expedition.

It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we notice that any emphasis on shape or structure or pattern or form always throws a verbal narrative in the direction we call mythical rather than historical.(p.21)

But in Texas discourse is seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis.

Painting taught literature to describe.

Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?

Ist nicht eigentliches Ziel von Roman und Museum, unsere Erinnerungen so aufrichtig wie möglich zu erzählen und dadurch unser Glück in das Glück anderer zu verwandeln?

Painting and happiness. I would like my dear readers who have given close attention to my story and my fate to bear these two things in mind, as they are the genesis of my world.

As?l olan hikâyedir. [...] Güzel bir resim bir hikâyeyi zarafetle tamamlar.

An illustration that does not complement a story, in the end, will become but a false idol. Since we cannot possibly believe in an absent story, we will naturally begin believing in the picture itself.

Roman sanat? kendi yaÅŸad???m?z hikayeleri baÅŸkalar?n?n hikayesi gibi, baÅŸkalar?n?n yaÅŸad??? hikayeleri de kendimiz yaÅŸam???z gibi yazabilme hünerine dayan?r.

Los diarios franceses... así como el Daily Telegraph. reciclaron por enésima vez en sus páginas la idea de que el Imperio Otomano era el <>.

The art of the novel is based on the craft of telling our own stories as if they belonged to others, and of telling other people's stories as if they were our own.

what is important or a painter is not a thing's reality but it's shape, and what is important for a novelist is not the course of events but their ordering, and what is important for a memorist is not the factual accuracy of the account, but it's symmetry.

the hüzün the boy has carried with him since birth will lead the story into melodrama.

distinguish hearsay from what we've seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we "remember" our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention

El verdadero placer de leer una novela empieza con la capacidad de ver el mundo no desde el exterior, sino a través de los ojos de los protagonistas que viven en ese mundo.

Hegel je bio taj koji je prvi primijetio da su povijest i kazalište satkani od iste materije, rekao je Sunaj. Podsjetio je da - jednako kao i kazalište i povijest dodjeljuje uloge. I kao što na kazališne daske mogu istr?ati samo oni najhrabriji, i na pozornicu povijesti izlaze samo odabrani...

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said - to the consternation of her family - What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell. Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it. And it's delicious.