Narrative Quotes

I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.

People don't think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

'God' - as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to.

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

We can change the narrative about Africa with content.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

What gets left out is the narrative between the bullets, which would tell us who's going to do what and how we're going to achieve the generic goals on the list.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.

Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, . . . for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.

In all the history of the boxing game, you'll find no human interest story to compare with the life narrative of James J. Braddock.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Whenever science attempts to legitimate itself, it is no longer scientific but narrative, appealing to an orienting myth that is not susceptible to scientific legitimation.

The narratives of Scripture were not meant to describe our world ... but to change the world, including the one in which we now live.

By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

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.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable.

Meaning arises from loving life, not from goals or narratives.

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

To me, it's just that social media is allowing people to be in charge of their own narratives.

Gesture will survive whatever kind of light you have. Gesture can triumph over anything because of its narrative content.

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past.

That decision to commit your life to certain principles and a certain narrative, if I wrote a paper on that, I know I'd find inconsistencies.

Within neoliberal narratives, youth are mostly defined as a consumer market, a drain on the economy, or stand for trouble.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder

I would have had the same narrative, regardless of the atmosphere and the restrictions.

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

Our response to the world is essentially one of wonder, of confronting the mysterious with a sense, not of being small, or insignificant, but of being part of a rich and complex narrative.

My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

I seek to widen, narrow narratives of women of color.

The crime part is the engine that moves the narrative and allows me to write the other things I want to write about.

Word, image, and sound all must have primacy in the development of the narrative.

When you're looking through a magazine, what makes you stop and think is when you see an image and imagine the narrative that is going on inside of it. Those are the ones I make into paintings.

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.

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

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.