Narrative Quotes

I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

Controlling the master narrative of Israel means vigilantly controlling the narrative about Palestine.

The Singing of Swans is a remarkable narrative calling--even compelling--us to connect with our own ancestral roots, to seek our own inner wisdom, and to reclaim our own inner voices!

I'm a narrative-minded actor. I'm thinking of the story. I'm not worried about whether the camera is on the right side of my face, or where the camera is. I'm just going for the story.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort-of narrative and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.

In narrative films, you set up reality, so you can limit the variables. You don't have that luxury with docs.

It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

Setting aside the issue of gender while highlighting the symmetry of bodies seemed indispensable in order to focus on the narrative of human beings in the making.

There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.

You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

I really admire the experimentalists who challenge traditional narrative - writers like Ishmael Reed, Michael Martone, Donald Barthelme, Tatyana Tolstaya, George Saunders, and many others.

It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.

STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue.

Escaping into the fantasy of intellectual investigation or narrative story telling makes me feel hopeful. That too is a fiction, but one that makes me feel good sometimes.

I like it when shows end intentionally, and Review, especially, has such a long form narrative that it feels like you need to give it a thoughtfully constructed finale.

Change the narrative, change the laws.

Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

I tend to employ braided narrative threads in the lyric, so often echoes (of phrases or images) will occur and will hit my ear so I can shape different resonances and shifts in tone.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

I very much admire Sheryl Sandberg for what she has done. I really do. But Sandberg's narrative also implies: "Well, it's your fault if you couldn't make it." There is a certain injustice in that.

We all love narratives where we're the captain of our boat, and Americans love them more than anybody else.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can't skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what's going on.

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There's no joy of discovery in what you're doing if that's your strategy.

That's what culture is based on, the passing down of a certain narrative by imitation.

My shows are not narratives.

Documentary filmmaking has all the challenges and hardships of narrative filmmaking without any of the infrastructure or support. That's both a blessing and a curse.

I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa's dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between "us" and "them" to arrive at a "we."

In documentary you sometimes see the tyranny of the linear, but what I've noticed in the last ten years in narrative film is the tyranny of the non-linear.

There's a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It's a narrative of hope.

The whole idea of civilization as an understandable narrative is a bit nuts. It's the most problematic of delusions.

…everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.

The juxtaposition of words - the color, feeling, and sound of the words together - has as much to do with the story as the narrative itself does.

I want to be in a good movie, and so the narrative is way more important.

I think that through the narratives of other people you get closer to your own.

I wanted each different Chelsea to be able to navigate her own world without having to also speak to a larger narrative.

Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

I came to New York, and it was a really cool time. People like Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee were making their first movies, and they were making movies that were personal narratives.

There were Hollywood movies and then there were those aggressively anti-narrative films that they showed at the Collective for Living Cinema.

I would say that ISIS wants us to think so. And I think that's the real danger here. It's that what ISIS wants the narrative to be is that they are the true Muslims.