Quotes About Narrative

I think the main thing over time is that you gain confidence and are able to tell your story better and stronger.

The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.

Begin as if you will finish. Let the story be told that you had the courage to begin.

Death steals everything except our stories.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

Death means you are in the third person.

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

Every soldier in the course of time exists only in the breath of written word.

The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction — there are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome.

The only patient being treated by the writer is himself

What is the archetypal Bible story? A story of betrayal. Of treachery. It's just one deception after another.

that the Jews were victims before they were conquerors and that they are conquerors only because they are victims.

The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction, and that is enough.

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.

If a writer believes that women do nothing, then he will have to fantasize about their lives to make a good story. If a writer believes that women are weak, rivalrous, and moody, then she will produce an account of them in which they cannot work together, or be trusted. But I know from my reading and from my own life that women are powerful agents of change who can collaborate together, who may love each other, and I base my story on the reality. But

I developed a style of writing: first person, so that you are in someone's shoes, facing their dilemmas, and present tense, so that you have no historians' hindsight, you are in the then and there, not looking back.

A ficção pega numa história, ou num aspecto do todo, e pode narrar acontecimentos trágicos, potentes, individuais; mas é o todo que deveria ser contado: e o todo é inconcebível.

Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.

For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.

There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust

this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns.)