Quotes About Narrative

Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

I sing of arms and of a man…

She spoke the

Yet this is not a novel. It is a faithful transcription of my memories, some of them hazy, others riddled with holes left by the passage of the years, others patched up by time and the filters of experience and distance, and still others, no doubt, completely invented by the stubborn narrator we all have within us, who wants things to be the way they sound best to us now, and not the way they were.

La Historia con mayúscula la escriben siempre los vencedores, pero su versión no tiene por qué ser eterna. Algunos países europeos, como Polonia o Hungría, han sabido integrar el fracaso de sus luchadores por la libertad en el patrimonio de su orgullo nacional, asumiendo que ciertas derrotas, lejos de implicar deshonor, pueden ser más honrosas que muchas victorias.

Today's worries are yesterday's fears and tomorrow's stories.

Everything of value contains a story, Solange.

Cualquiera que viva un infierno durable o pajero puede, para enfrentarse a él, recurrir a la técnica mental más gratificantes de cuantas existen: contarse un cuento.

Ce que l'on a vécu laisse dans la poitrine une musique : c'est elle qu'on s'efforce d'entendre à travers le récit. Il s'agit d'écrire ce son avec les moyens du langage. Cela suppose des coupes et des approximations. On élague pour mettre à nu le trouble qui nous a gagnés.

The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.

Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long.

As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.

I like for jewelry to tell a story and to be able to talk about what I'm wearing. That's more important to me than a name, brand, or label.

I like the fact that I'm from the South and that I have this rich history behind me. I come from a family of storytellers. They can't just tell you how someone went to the store. They have to tell you who they saw, what they were wearing, what they said, what they had in their grocery cart.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

When we revel in hindsight, we have a tendency to embellish. We weave romantic and poetic fibres into the gaps in our memory.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.

I love it when real science finds a home in a fictional setting, where you take some real core idea of science and weave it through a fictional narrative in order to bring it to life, the way stories can. That's my favorite thing.

I've never been able to write narrative as a character, really. Jenny Lewis, I love her stuff, I love that she can weave these American Gothic fairytales. I feel like I sound inauthentic when I do that, so I tend to write from a personal standpoint.

I think the more web video there is, the more press you'll get, as well as all the people who want to tell stories that haven't been told before but can't do that on TV because different stories are a risk.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.