Quotes About Narrative

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

It is astonishing how few stories have been told perfectly.

This book has too much plot and not enough story.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

In a funny way, the stories keep themselves alive by emerging from one another. I like that.

Most of the stories I have go downhill quickly. In all honesty most of the good stories I have, no one else would think is funny.

Humor is important. If you're going to tell any sort of realistic story, you're going to have to have humor in it, because people are funny. Clever people especially.

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.

He who controls the past controls the future.

Whenever you think that your needs are not being met, you're telling the story of a future

When you change your NOW story, you instantly change your past story and your future story.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

I'm not the color of my skin. I'm a story. One with a past and a future unwritten.

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away.

The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others.

Our larger goal is to tell the story

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.