Quotes About Narrative

Working in Moscow from 1933 until 1945, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács (1885–1971) developed a theory of "Critical Realism" with respect to literature. Lukács admired narrative novelists such as Cervantes (1547–1616), Balzac (1799–1850), Dickens (1812–70), Gorky (1868–1936), Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Thomas Mann (1875–1955).

There was a duplication of myself involved, perhaps even a triplication. There was I who was writing. There was I whom I could remember. And there was I of whom I wrote, the protagonist of the story.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

Out of silence I begin to hear the voices of characters whispering snippets of a story to me.

We're all the heroes of our own tales. Even villains.

Stories have the power to make people feel. To give a shit. To change their opinions. To change the world.

There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.

As I said, history is written by the victors. The truth is, the villains were less villainous, and the heroes less heroic, than you've been told.

It's true what they say, then-history is written by the victors.

A description of autism must be anecdotal; without anecdotes there are words but not experience.

I ask: was every story ever written in the world a story of affliction?

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.

No one should adhere to the facts that contribute to narrative, the facts that create lives. To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds. Those sensations form a someone. The headaches begin then. Don't wear sunglasses in the house, the world says, though they soothe, soothe sight, soothe you.

There are many hostelries in his report, which is the true account of an expedition.

Your time has come to pick the road you walk in this tale.

You men always try to tell our story. You men always get it wrong.

West in Buffalo Bayou. Why don't they like that? "Because it casts reasonable doubt on David West's story! "It is unreasonable to believe that a woman was

A biography is like a mini-series with different twists and turns, ups and downs. Others will rewrite it for you when you forget to sign on the last page.

No man can walk away from his own story

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out

The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.