Narrative Quotes

History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go.

For me, intuitive thinking means associative thinking; intuition causes us to introduce narrative or figurative elements into a poem before we're able to explain why those elements belong.

Classical music fulfills for me the function of narrative. I spend 90 minutes a day listening to symphonic music - Beethoven to Bartók - some chamber pieces, and that's my enrichment.

I've created a narrative of the world. I live in the world - tenuously, most times. I've avoided the digital world.

My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is born again.

The word "story" is short for the word "history." They both have the same root and fundamentally mean the same thing. A story is a narrative on an event or series of events, just like history.

What gets lost in the textbook is the overall narrative. It gets lost in all the boxes and all the photos and all the little stuff that's stuck in all the time.

There is a narrative behind every image. I often imagine being able to see the photographer standing behind the camera, or perhaps crouching or running with it.

I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.

I want to do different projects and be versatile. I don't want to get fixed into narrative comedy.

Writers know - especially new writers - [that] a lot of it [creative process] is the prewriting stage, the talking, brainstorming, the narrative arc and the character sketches.

When you're going with a huge dramatic disaster film, try to keep the narrative as simple as possible.

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.

The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.

I'm glad that Jewish kids are taught about the Holocaust and other stories in our history, but I wonder if there are ways that this information and narrative can be transmitted differently.

I never start with the story first, which is maybe obvious, because the narrative line of my films is really not that strong or dramatic. They're very simple.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.

I'm not interested in being perfect when im older. Im interested in having a narrative. It's the narrative that's really the most beautiful thing about women.

For me, a tour show should have a narrative; it should have an arc. It shouldn't just be, "Here's one joke, here's another joke." That's not my style. They all have to somehow link together.

The ultimate for me would be to do a feature that didn't require any narrative structure.

Directing music videos, especially ones that are concept/narrative driven is challenging in itself, but Directing a music video within a digital video environment is even more difficult.

I'm a little bit too obsessed with the news. I find the news easier to follow than narrative entertainment programs.

I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.

If I believe that abortion is wrong, and I want to convince you that it's wrong, there's no reason I should recount to you my personal narrative of how I came to believe this.

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

I found that while it was interesting to travel around and take the photographs, I would find that I was more interested in the stories behind the photographs. I was more interested in narrative.

I've gotten used to spending more time with heavily narrative stories.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

Somebody once asked me if I have anything like faith, and I said I have faith in the narrative. I have a belief in a narrative that is bigger than me, that is alive and I trust will work itself out.

I'm pretty much good at heroic narratives and making people laugh.

Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.

I'm one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I've been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.

Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the Washington Post.

When I was singing "King of the Mountain," it was a pivotal point in the show. That's the song that took us from this concert setting of individual songs into the theatrical narrative piece.

If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.

Marie Houzelle is a master of the first-person narrative. In Tita she has created a strange, utterly original child whose deadpan certainties are a beguiling invitation to readers of all ages.

When State Way Gardens and The Robert Taylor Homes were being torn down, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to use that as a backdrop for the development of a super hero narrative.

A continuing narrative throughout Australia's history that says it is better to build up than to tear down - this is the continuing mission of Labor.

I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.

I like narrative, and I ultimately am in love with the men and women I write about, most of them.

There [in The Kite Runner] certainly are, as is always the case with fiction, autobiographical elements woven through the narrative.

Ralph Angel was such a great character. The single-father image has been portrayed in so many ways so having the ability to be a part of that narrative excites me!

I think people respond to truthful, simple narrative, and the more you try to dress it up to try and do something else, the harder it is for people to relate to.

Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.

I like the idea of building this wandering, epic narrative in a form that people don't expect epic narratives to appear.

To be simple, I would say a story has to have a bit of narrative, if only "she says," and then enough of a creation of a different time and place to transport the reader.

If you go in with a plan to make a point, and you know what your narrative is going to be already, in our mind, it's probably not worth telling.

When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.

As we begin to become aware of the narrative patterns around which we structure our lives, we learn how to take charge, revise, refine, and even completely rewrite them.