Narrative Quotes

Now [Sue Grafton] loves writer's block, seeing it as a message from the psyche that the narrative is headed in the wrong direction.

Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content.

Isabel Wilkerson's book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don't miss it!

Documentaries are unpredictable. You never know what will turn up, and the drama occurs in real time. But if you listen to people, a narrative always emerges.

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

I was not a particularly brave child, I think, because I had a narrative mind, because my mind automatically went to any terrible thing that could happen.

Finding one's voice - or creating a narrative voice that has the power to carry your story - is the hardest part.

I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.

I used to use a lot of words in the paintings but stopped because it created a narrative - or an answer to a question.

Many Christians understand the Bible to be a collection of stories without an overarching narrative.

I think it's good practice, if you're a writer, or anyone who's shaping narrative, to be flexible and open with the direction of the narrative.

I believe when you're writing film or television, you can't rely on a crutch or rule that exists outside of the narrative of the film.

I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.

More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.

A lot of Broadway has that immigrant narrative of America as a place where you can become something else against all odds.

Poetry, for me, conveys the essence of narrative rather than its particulars.

I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end.

Music is such an integral part of a film and really drives the emotional narrative, it has to be integrated from the beginning.

We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal

The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

A denial of the reality of demonical possessions on the part of anyone who believes the Gospel narrative to be true and inspired may justly be regarded as simply and plainly inconceivable.

However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic.

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.

It turns up the heat under a narrative when you limit the characters in their movements or their freedoms.

You can't outsmart or outguess the audience in terms of what the narrative answer is.

He managed to do this 'tour de force' of styles without ever breaking the narrative structure of the chapter he was writing. It is the most brilliant parody of writing styles that I have ever read.

My job as a film editor is to construct a dramatic narrative because otherwise it's just a chaotic arrangement of sequences.

I know that the emotional narrative will work in the end, and I just have to play each moment honestly even if the getting from A to B doesn't totally make sense initially.

Let's say that what's out there is a narrative. Often enough, the picture plays with the question of what actually is happening. Almost the way puns function.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. But you do, from your experience, surmise something. You do give a photograph symbolic content, narrative content... But it's nothing to worry about!

I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

I am thoroughly tired of the fable style of narrative and shall do my best to get up something entirely different and possibly little more worthy.

Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.

There's an obvious investment in some media circles in the "narrative" of "the pope who's finally going to get with it."

Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure.

Films are fantastic - they are one of the peaks of human narrative. But I'm sorry to break the news to the movie industry: So is a video game.

The bone-breaking thing is something that I put in many narratives.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Within neoliberal narratives, the message is clear: Buy/ sell/ or be punished.

I'm handed a bunch of existing data. My job is to put that in the best narrative form. That is a puzzle I love to solve.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.