Narrative Quotes

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened...

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is...

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am fr...

Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make i...

But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to...

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

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) i...

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing w...

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m ...

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who ...

Anecdotes came with his DNA.

There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can’t explain without handi...

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three o...

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lov...

There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or...

I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrativ...

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is...

The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ri...

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability ...

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from th...

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those thi...

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of cour...

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those thi...

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another...

Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because...

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look a...

Everyone listened to this amusing narrative with great interest, and the moment that Behemoth conclu...

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you chan...

The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is a...

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories...

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One...

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

All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he...