Quotes About Narrative

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.

History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

History is the new poetry.

History after all is the true poetry.

Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood

Patriotism corrupts history.

The West Wing seems to be feeding the myth about how presidential politics are.

[The director] has to, I feel, be one step back, not only from cinema, but also from politics and all these issues in order to tell and depict the situation that spreads to people.

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

If we own the story then we can write the ending.

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

What I may intend for a story to communicate and what a story ends up communicating could be two different things. And it could be an even more positive thing.

Our lives preserved. How it was and how it will be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.

Live your life in such a way that it is going to be the favorite story of your generation and generations to come.