Narrative Quotes

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. (John Updike)
Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder. View quote
Paul Ricœur
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. View quote
E. L. Doctorow
Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. View quote
W. S. Gilbert
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. View quote
Mark Twain
I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from. View quote
Anne Enright
In terms of a narrative nonfiction book, when you're describing scenes that you have multiple sources for, and that you have differing sources for, and you decide to choose a path that puts all that information together, well yeah, there's definitely going to be a little bit of the author in that. But there's nothing wrong with that. View quote
Ben Mezrich
I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told. View quote
Brian Selznick
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. View quote
Jane Smiley
The journey and excursions in Mexico which have originated the narrative and remarks contained in this volume were made in the months of March, April, May, and June of 1856, for the most part on horseback. View quote
Edward Burnett Tylor
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)
It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step. View quote
Harry Mathews
We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people. View quote
Robert Morgan
The lyrics are different from Nick Cave songs and lyrics. His songs are very narrative. View quote
Stephen Malkmus
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. View quote
Umberto Eco
Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes. View quote
Francis Parkman
As project chief you are creating a narrative, a story, a good yarn. If you look at the process-journey that way, you and your gang will ... dramatically up the odds of a WOW outcome! View quote
Tom Peters
First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai. View quote
Paul Ricœur
The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own. (Jeanette Winterson)
Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world. View quote
Northrop Frye
The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east. View quote
James A. Michener
The ultimate for me would be to do a feature that didn't require any narrative structure. View quote
Johnny Depp