Narrative famous quotes

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
-- A. S. Byatt

#Narrative

I hear music as narrative.
-- Ajay Naidu

#Narrative

I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.
-- Alec Soth

#Book #Thinking #Narrative

I learned there's an amazing unexplored territory in terms of narrative. Before, I thought the unexplored territory was the form, the way you shoot a movie. Now, I'm learning about the beautiful marriage between form and narrative.
-- Alfonso Cuaron

#Beautiful #Narrative #Territory

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.
-- Ali Smith

#Two #Narrative #Invisible

Narrative is the beginning of recovery.
-- Amanda Ripley

#Recovery #Narrative

Fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph.
-- Andrew Solomon

#Triumph #Events #Narrative

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.
-- Arthur Smith

#Believe #Sister In Law #Narrative

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

#Atmosphere #Narrative #Restriction

In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.
-- Ava DuVernay

#Narrative #Documentaries #Situation

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.
-- Ava DuVernay

#Narrative #Admire

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

#Pain #Joy #Narrative

I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative switftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.
-- Bernard Herrmann

#Character #Links #Narrative

After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.
-- Bruce Feiler

#Strong #Important #Narrative

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

#Stories #Narrative #Inspired

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.
-- Bruce Springsteen

#Narrative #Rock N Roll #Tradition

I write short, my words tight to the thread of the narrative.
-- Carmen Laforet

#Writing #Narrative #Thread

Poetry, above all is a series of intense moments ­ its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.
-- Carol Ann Duffy

#Narrative #Facts #Emotion

Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.
-- Caroline Knapp

#Black And White #Culture #Narrative

As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narratives of their own…women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Destiny #Long #Narrative

Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.
-- Carter Burwell

#Narrative #Adhesive #Film

I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative.
-- Cate Blanchett

#Narrative #Heroines

It`s the nature of cable news that we [TV hosts] do a lot of clipping and quoting of other broadcasts and outlets, sometimes to make a narrative point, sometimes to make a political one, and sometimes just to make a joke.
-- Chris Hayes

#Political #News #Narrative

I used my instincts. It's very easy to imagine how you'd feel, actually. I just had to tell the narrative.
-- Christopher Eccleston

#Narrative #Imagine #Easy

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.
-- Clive James

#Narrative #Diaries #Philosopher

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.
-- Dana Spiotta

#Reading #Impact #Narrative

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

#People #Narrative

I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking
-- Darren Aronofsky

#Narrative #Filmmaking

I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.
-- Darren Aronofsky

#Narrative #Theme #Filmmaking

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
-- David Antin

#Different #Stories #Narrative

It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.
-- David Brooks

#Simple #Narrative #Imbalance

To know how to structure the joke perfectly so that the narrative information is given in the right tempo, in just the right dose - it sometimes takes quite a lot of work. It seems easy when you hear the joke.
-- David Salle

#Narrative #Information #Sometimes

I don't consider myself to be a crusader of any sort. I was bystander to a certain number of newspaper crusades. They end badly, in terms of being either fraudulent or by inspiring legislations that makes things worse. So, I regard myself as someone coming to the campfire with the truest possible narrative he can acquire.
-- David Simon

#Bystanders #Numbers #Narrative

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
-- David Whyte

#Average #Narrative #Truthful

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.
-- Diane Wakoski

#Voice #Narrative

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

#Want #Narrative #Ends

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

#Emotional #Narrative #Film

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

#Fiction #Narrative #Nonfiction

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

#Fiction #Narrative #Nonfiction

In spite of the air of fablethe public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Reality #Air #Narrative

Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.
-- Edward Gibbon

#History #Naked #Narrative

The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.
-- Edward Norton

#Narrative #Documentaries #Kind

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.
-- Edward Tufte

#Goal #Narrative #Bullets

I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.
-- Elmore Leonard

#Writing #Narrative #Jazz

The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater, and is closer to music. It’s abstract but still narrative. Everything feels less rehearsed. It’s more experimental than classical.
-- Emmanuel Lubezki

#Narrative #Language #Film

The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.
-- Erica Jong

#Photography #Cameras #Narrative

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
-- Eugenio Montale

#Art #Narrative #Proust

As for the heart It needs a beginning The narrative Burden of events
-- Fady Joudah

#Heart #Needs #Narrative

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.
-- Gail Collins

#Writing #People #Narrative

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

#Light #Narrative #Surface

My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible.
-- George Armstrong Custer

#Truth #Purpose #Narrative

Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.
-- Greg Graffin

#Tragedy #Narrative #Comfort

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.
-- Griffin Dunne

#Narrative #Documentaries #Inspired

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.
-- Hilary Liftin

#Jobs #Data #Narrative

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Skills #Narrative

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Ideas #Play #Narrative

Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too.
-- Howard Gardner

#Important #Use #Narrative

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

#Literature #Narrative #Argument

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information,
-- Ian Mcewan

#Narrative #Information #Withholding Information

I don't like the triumphalism of the American narrative, this kind of "chosen people" complex that American people have, so it's inspiring to see people snub their noses at the American empire and succeed.
-- Ian Svenonius

#People #Noses #Narrative

I am the daughter of Mr. Neo-realism: I should gravitate towards narrative simply told, character, the truth. And I do love those movies.
-- Isabella Rossellini

#Daughter #Character #Narrative

History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go.
-- J. R. Moehringer

#People #Narrative

Over the centuries we have transformed the ancient myths and folk tales and made them into the fabric of our lives. Consciously and unconsciously we weave the narratives of myth and folk tale into our daily existence.
-- Jack Zipes

#Fabric #Narrative #Ancient

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.
-- James Fenton

#Epic #Narrative #Heroic

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.
-- James K. A. Smith

#Narrative #Myth

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

#Tools #Narrative #Firsts

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

#Dark #Narrative #Firsts

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Lying #Dark #Narrative

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.
-- Jeff Bezos

#Book #People #Narrative

In every debate, whatever the format, whatever the questions, there is one and only one way to identify the winner: Who commands the room? Who drives the narrative? Who is in charge?
-- Jeff Greenfield

#Narrative #Way #Rooms

If there's a narrative, I want it in the flesh.
-- Jenny Saville

#Flesh #Want #Narrative

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.
-- Jerry Saltz

#Art #Camouflage #Narrative

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.
-- Jessica Stern

#People #Anxiety #Narrative

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

#Narrative #Cold #Chemical Reactions

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.
-- Joe Hill

#Character #Thinking #Narrative

'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.
-- Johann Most

#Book #Narrative #Want

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
-- John Berger

#Space #Giving #Narrative

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.
-- John Burnside

#World #Narrative #Mysterious

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
-- John Dufresne

#Anxiety #Narrative #Causes

Specificity is the soul of narrative.
-- John Hodgman

#Soul #Narrative #Specificity

The most effective way to defeat patriarchy is to defy and disown its self-legitimating narrative.
-- John Lamb Lash

#Self #Narrative #Way

Sooner or later the Narrative will come for each of us.
-- John Scalzi

#Narrative #Sooner Or Later

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.
-- John William Draper

#Two #Discovery #Narrative

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

#Ideas #Space #Narrative

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.
-- Jonathan Lethem

#Art #Fiction #Narrative

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

#Narrative #Metaphor #Myth

No matter how stark the reality, a human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable.
-- Joshua Prager

#Reality #Narrative #Matter

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

#Drama #Criticism #Narrative

We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos.
-- Julianne Moore

#Order #Narrative #Chaos

Meaning arises from loving life, not from goals or narratives.
-- Julio Olalla

#Loving Life #Goal #Narrative

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.
-- Junot Diaz

#Stories #World #Narrative

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'
-- Kate Atkinson

#Writing #People #Narrative

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.
-- Katharine Weber

#Children #Age #Narrative

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

#Dna #Stories #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.
-- Kevin Rudd

#Australia #Tears #Narrative

One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.
-- Kiki Smith

#Space #Pieces #Narrative

I tried to control the narrative.
-- Lance Armstrong

#Narrative

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

#Character #Creating #Narrative

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.
-- Marianne Wiggins

#Rocks #Car #Narrative

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

#Together #Narrative #Movement