Quotes About Narrative

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don't know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela's empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch's reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer was inclined to hurry – in order not to miss the bedtime story.

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

When the lies of omission unravel, so does the story.

The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it's the perfect thing to have happen at that time.

Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean?

I just don't dare to make up everything, like you do." I don't make up everything, but when I use things that actually happened, I always change something; I try to make what happens not exactly true.

Nana never remembered where you stopped reading, and wherever you started Moby-Dick, Mildred Brewster knew exactly where she was in the story. What my grandmother didn't know was where she was in her own story.

It's Shakespearean, Bill; lots of the important stuff in Shakespeare happens offstage - you just hear about it.

I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself – as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me.

You can see why we children asked so many questions. It is a vague story, the kind parents prefer to tell.

foreshadowing is the storytelling companion of fate.

His exposure to storytelling, through Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, had ill prepared him for characters who came from and traveled nowhere -- or for stories that made no sense.

book is always in motion – from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading

It's not like writing a novel. It's easy to know the future when I'm making up the story.

My becoming a Canadian citizen was part of the plot.

We incline to see history through the lives of great men. That inclination blinds us to the real complexity …

Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it? 'I am the carpenter….

Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.

The disease has survived in memory more than in any literature. Nearly all those who were adults during the pandemic have died now. Now the memory lives in the minds of those who only heard stories, who heard how their mother lost her father, how an uncle became an orphan, or heard an aunt say, "It was the only time I ever saw my father cry." Memory dies with people. The writers of the 1920s had little to say about it.

The lead—like the title—should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don't use the lead.

I'm not so good at just throwing out facts and figures and education and all that. I tell stories to captivate, that give people... that touch people emotionally.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

Wearing clothes should be a personal narrative of emotion. I always respond to fashion in an emotional way.