Narrative quotes:

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  • Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. -- Eugenio Montale
  • Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder -- Paul Ricoeur
  • Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid. -- Thomas Carlyle
  • It's actually pretty complex, because there's two levels of reality in the narrative. One is what really took place, and the other is Spider's poisoned version of what took place. -- Gabriel Byrne
  • Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves. -- Jane Smiley
  • Narrative is the beginning of recovery. -- Amanda Ripley
  • Narrative living is the beginning of rhetoric. -- N.D. Wilson
  • Narrative Tension is primarily about witholding information. -- Ian Mcewan
  • Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information, -- Ian Mcewan
  • Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers. -- A. S. Byatt
  • Sooner or later the Narrative will come for each of us. -- John Scalzi
  • Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. -- Toni Morrison
  • Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder. -- Paul Ricoeur
  • Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress. -- Anton Chekhov
  • Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error. -- Barry Ritholtz
  • Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job. -- Dennis Lehane
  • Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand. -- Jess Row
  • Narrative and characters have always interested me. I never tried to alienate an audience. Of course, gradually, I wanted a bigger and bigger space to draw people in, so it's very organic. -- Miranda July
  • Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking. -- Griffin Dunne
  • I love the freedom that the narrative form provides. -- Sidney Sheldon
  • My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible. -- George Armstrong Custer
  • The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions. -- Edward Norton
  • To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination. -- Philip Stanhope
  • I write short, my words tight to the thread of the narrative. -- Carmen Laforet
  • I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition. -- Bruce Springsteen
  • The lyrics are different from Nick Cave songs and lyrics. His songs are very narrative. -- Stephen Malkmus
  • Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films. -- Carter Burwell
  • The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it. -- Robert Coover
  • You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world. -- Jeff Bezos
  • All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary. -- Barbara Kruger
  • I used my instincts. It's very easy to imagine how you'd feel, actually. I just had to tell the narrative. -- Christopher Eccleston
  • Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable. -- Kenneth R. Miller
  • Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy. -- Barry Hannah
  • I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow. -- Howard Nemerov
  • In spite of recent trends towards fabricating photographic narratives, I find, more than ever, traditional photographic capture, the 'discovery' of found narratives, deeply compelling. -- Richard Misrach
  • Most religions live from a narrative that shapes their relationship with the divine other, God or the gods, and with the human other, the stranger. -- Timothy Radcliffe
  • Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question. -- Peter Straub
  • As a reader, I notice political views regardless of whether or not the book is fiction. What annoys me is when said views do nothing to advance the narrative. -- Jen Lancaster
  • People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive. -- E. O. Wilson
  • We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread. -- Paul Auster
  • The idea of suicide is of a very set narrative, as if killing yourself is a definitive statement. But it can be just as meaningless as throwing a stone in a river. -- Denise Mina
  • In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc. -- Juan Goytisolo
  • The journey and excursions in Mexico which have originated the narrative and remarks contained in this volume were made in the months of March, April, May, and June of 1856, for the most part on horseback. -- Edward Burnett Tylor
  • I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film. -- Sam Taylor-Wood
  • Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction. -- Paul Auster
  • Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative. -- Marilyn Hacker
  • The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character. -- Paul Ricoeur
  • What, after all, is the narrative of 'the American Dream?' It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era. -- Naomi Wolf
  • The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play. -- Patrick Marber
  • I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show. -- Steven Spielberg
  • Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist. -- Steven Pinker
  • Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now. -- Tim Walker
  • As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames. -- Douglas Rushkoff
  • A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. -- John Updike
  • I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness. -- Lois Lowry
  • It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit. -- Peter Ackroyd
  • If you go back far enough and get a wider enough picture of history, we have let go of many things that follow a religious narrative. We don't burn witches anymore. Most people would consider that barbaric. We don't sacrifice human beings, which was a religious act practiced by numerous cultures on this planet. -- Greg Graffin
  • Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands. -- Alan Rickman
  • In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures. -- Douglas Rushkoff
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  • I think the goal with any writing, but especially narrative nonfiction, is to put the blockade of putting your thoughts in this unnatural medium of print and then trying to reach through that and actually convey what's going on, what you think, and make people laugh and recognize themselves while doing it. Definitely the laughing thing. -- Sloane Crosley
  • I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard - sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was 'Wired' magazine. -- John Battelle
  • I hear music as narrative. -- Ajay Naidu
  • My god is narrative filmmaking. -- Darren Aronofsky
  • I tried to control the narrative. -- Lance Armstrong
  • You can reclaim your own narrative. -- Paula Broadwell
  • Specificity is the soul of narrative. -- John Hodgman
  • Change the narrative, change the laws. -- Ani DiFranco
  • STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. -- Ambrose Bierce
  • Objects are better than text at conveying narrative -- Neil MacGregor
  • Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Any historical narrative is a bundle of silences. -- Michel-Rolph Trouillot
  • Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative. -- David Shields
  • Data coming out our ears but we lack narrative. -- Roy Sekoff
  • We can change the narrative about Africa with content. -- Mo Abudu
  • Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences. -- David Mitchell
  • History is a set of skills rather than a narrative. -- Hilary Mantel
  • I think that rap is narrative, when it's done right. -- Ajay Naidu
  • If there's a narrative, I want it in the flesh. -- Jenny Saville
  • American exceptionalism is the recurring character in the nation's narrative. -- Ron Fournier
  • I love narrative and sometimes I feel frustrated with stand-up. -- Rachel Zucker
  • I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction. -- Paul Auster
  • To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination. -- Philip Stanhope
  • I've gotten used to spending more time with heavily narrative stories. -- Joshuah Bearman
  • Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface. -- Garry Winogrand
  • Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't. -- Neil MacGregor
  • The power of narrative sort of defines something forever and ever. -- Rod Blackhurst
  • I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems. -- Matthea Harvey
  • The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not. -- Li-Young Lee
  • All writers, all storytellers, are imposing their own narrative on something. -- Michael Kimmelman
  • A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety. -- John Dufresne
  • We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment-nar rative catechisms. -- N.D. Wilson
  • To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination. -- Philip Stanhope
  • Poetry, for me, conveys the essence of narrative rather than its particulars. -- Delia Sherman
  • Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative. -- Todd Haynes
  • Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems. -- Robert Morgan
  • I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay. -- Susan Sontag
  • I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative. -- Robert Wilson
  • The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity. -- Scott Turow
  • The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature. -- Sol LeWitt
  • I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative. -- Janet Evanovich
  • I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium. -- Brian Eno
  • Fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph. -- Andrew Solomon
  • I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word. -- Ben Gibbard
  • I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative. -- Cate Blanchett
  • This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery. -- Samuel Johnson
  • History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go. -- J. R. Moehringer
  • I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films. -- Stanley Kubrick
  • The best way to truly understand narrative art is to experience it. -- George Lucas
  • Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive. -- Helen Dunmore
  • What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative. -- Joan Didion
  • As for the heart It needs a beginning The narrative Burden of events -- Fady Joudah
  • The viewer is more likely to project their own narrative onto the picture. -- Gregory Crewdson
  • I don't subscribe to the narrative that Africa is backward because of colonialism. -- Mo Ibrahim
  • I would have had the same narrative, regardless of the atmosphere and the restrictions. -- Asghar Farhadi
  • Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity. -- William Zinsser
  • I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters. -- Lydia Davis
  • Movie narration in the forties was radically different than the narrative involved in books. -- Robert Benton
  • I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking -- Darren Aronofsky
  • There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. -- E. L. Doctorow
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