Quotes About Narrative

There are times in the writing of history when we must use words we personally abhor.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

it is the narrator who is the "agent": he himself is the unifying idea. Not through what he tells us about himself or even through what he sees as he travels, but through the way he sees what he sees. It is the character of the persona's perspective that provides the narrative its striking inner life.

V S Naipaul] brings to [literary narrative] an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought. Observe hard, think even harder, figure out what you are thinking in the simplest, clearest language, and you will arrive at narrative: that is his credo.

If fantasy play provides the nourishing habitat for the growth of cognitive, narrative, and social connectivity in young children, then it is surely the staging area for our common enterprise: an early school experience that best represents the natural development of young children.

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.

Historians are gossips who tease the dead.

History is no more than the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

One of the best ways to inspire another person to desirable action is to relate a true story that appeals to his emotions.

He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.

If somebody has a chance to put my food in their mouth, that tells the story.

I always loved having the chance to disappear in a story. I always was kind of obsessed with that.

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

It's not all about content. It's all about stories. It's not all about stories. It's all about great stories.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

Stories are the most primitive and purest form of communication.

I get fed up with plots that are driven by someone constantly getting information on a computer.

You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.