Quotes About Narrative

The story's about you.

Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.

It is important for leaders to know their stories; to get them straight; to communicate them effectively, particularly to those who are in the thrall of rival stories; and, above all, to embody in their lives the stories that they tell.

Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader's arsenal

Hell, the first thing you've got to do if you're going to make a picture is to get a story. The next thing is to get a good script, the next thing is to figure out who the hell is going to play in it, your characters, and then after that to make it.

This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina , which is French for "Are you fucking kidding me?

There was a time when a book could be sold purely because its author had been to distant climes and had returned to tell of the exotic sights he had seen. That author was Marco Polo, and the time was the thirteenth century.

Like a small business, a novel cannot afford to carry dead weight, even if it is a close family member. It is likewise unnecessary to introduce a mother and/or father into a narrative—usually through the medium of a long telephone call on the subject of 'How's things?'—to demonstrate that the protagonist does, like all mammals, have parents.

Any scene in which a character is shown waking up in bed or getting into bed is deeply suspect, unless there is someone new in bed with her.

For mysterious reasons, many authors consider it useful to provide a story about a forty-year-old man-about-town with a prologue drawn from his life as a five-year-old boy. ... There's only one letter's difference between "yarn" and "yawn," and it is often a long letter, filled with childhood memories.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

The merchant's success depends on his or her ability to tell a story. What people see or hear or smell or do when they enter a space guides their feelings, enticing them to celebrate whatever the seller has to offer.

There cannot be any 'story' without a fall – all stories are ultimately about the fall – at least not for human minds as we know them and have them. Letter 130 From a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin

In Pakistan, a perception has been officially cultivated that anyone who offers facts, statistics or opinions that do not coincide with the national narrative does so at the behest of Pakistan's many external enemies.

Adrian Forty was perhaps the first person to propose that the surprise answer to the missing term in the old equation, architecture = buildings + x, was words. If that's right, as I am increasingly persuaded, it explains why so much talk and writing envelops the practice of design.

In your emails, instead of just writing about your topics, tell a story that illustrates your points.

They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage." (Rule of Four, 54-55)

Each of us becomes a new person as we redescribe the past.

A marriage is built on nothing so much as the story of that marriage.

Place becomes psyche, story becomes history.

The true legends are the broken ones: fragments of histories, tellings, embellishments, edits and re-edits. Truth abhors a narrative.