Quotes About Narrative

I wanted to fold into the 'Hellraiser' narrative something about the guy - the Frenchman Lemarchand - who made the mysterious box, which raises Pinhead. I figured, 'Well, what would have happened to him?' He might well have been taken to Devil's Island, and I thought that would be a pretty cool place to start the movie.

I hate acting when I see it. I don't want to feel it, I don't want to see it, I want to be taken away with the story - I don't want the actor's ego in front of me. That's what I try to live when I do the work.

As soon as I left Georgia, my narrative became about taking risks and the fight for creative bedroom artists with no platform.

History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.

No matter what you write, you actually can't help retelling a fairy tale somewhere along the way.

My family were great story-tellers. My mum was one of 12 and they were all fighting to tell stories. You have to tell a good tale or no one is going to listen. You have to make it entertaining and interesting. That's how I learned to tell stories.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

The search for inventive ways of telling the tale of Christ's birth has been going on a long time; in a way, difference was there from the start with Luke and Matthew.

Looking back at it now, any objective account of my life is bound to read like a cross between 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' and a travel brochure.

My mother's childhood was complex, disjointed, and disturbing. As children, we would gather round and ask her to tell us again and again The Story of Her Childhood. It was Grimmsian, Andersenesque: a classic fairy tale replete with goodies and baddies.

I say 'spectacle' rather than 'story' because in the end, it isn't the intricacies of narrative that draw us to horror films. When it's there, I'm grateful for the director's skill at telling an exquisitely nuanced tale filled with psychological insight, but it is the spectacles that I take home with me.

When I start a new novel, I often write 'test chapters' in different tenses and from different points of view in order to figure out which is best to tell the tale.

I think if you are a talented person, your story makes you a bigger star rather than the art.

I've long been interested in the tale-within-a-tale phenomenon. I'm familiar with many tales which use this framework or the device of many people in one place, telling their stories, or multiple storytellers commenting on each others' stories with their own.

My grandmother was born in 1900, and she would regale me with tales I call 'Little House on the Prairie' tales, but they were tales of segregated and racist America growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, where she came from.

Definitely they write themselves. It's an amazing experience. It's like the characters have come alive and are sitting on my shoulder talking to me, telling me their tales.

Fairy tales and folk tales have always played a role in my writing in one way or another.

It's not just dead men who tell no tales. Live ones don't have much to say for themselves, either.

As a child, I loved fairy tales because the story, the what-comes-next, is paramount. As an adult, I'm fascinated by their logic and illogic.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.

People regard CGI as a gimmick; they almost blame CGI for a bad story or a bad script. They talk about CGI as if it's responsible for a drop in standards.

Conservative talk radio works because there are lots of conservatives who are convinced that they are not getting the whole story from the regular media.

I haven't talked much about being an ovarian cancer survivor because I don't really want to define myself that way.

Andrew has talked about my character being the conscience of the film, the heart of the film.