Narrative Quotes

See also Core English Vocabulary (N) Quotes

On horror movies: "It`s like boot camp for the psyche. In real life, human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers, events like Columbine. But the narrative form puts these fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears."

- Wes Craven

I don`t think it is the narrative necessarily that is the most important thing I think it is the human interaction that is the most important thing.

- Maggie Gyllenhaal

I`m Godless. I`ve had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.

- Darren Aronofsky

One of the things that`s great about Training Day (2001) is that you have two very distinct personalities, but it`s true: it also has a great plot. If you can do both, it`s incredibly exciting for the audience. Oftentimes, you have art films that have no narrative to speak of and instead offer characterization; then you have mainstream movies that are simple formulas, A-B-C-D. Training Day (2001) is a good combo.

- Ethan Hawke

It`s actually pretty complex, because there`s two levels of reality in the narrative. One is what really took place, and the other is Spider`s poisoned version of what took place.

- Gabriel Byrne

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We`ll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

- James Cameron

You are absolutely free to describe me as a turtle or something. Seriously. When you profile someone, there has to be a narrative, and my narrative just happens to be `Who is he?`, `Oh, he`s that guy` and `He looks like a squid!` Sideways (2004) doesn`t change that. Honestly, I never wanted to be more than a good supporting actor. Really, I enjoy it.

- Paul Giamatti

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

- Bruce Springsteen

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

- Christopher Eccleston

It sort of started with this idea of doing a teen noir show. The first-person, hard-boiled narrative is inherent in noir. I wanted her to sound like a 17-year-old female Raymond Chandler.

- Rob Thomas

After doing the research with all the vocals on Medúlla, I was very curious to take that further to a place that was not narrative. Then, when Matthew explained that the film happens on the ocean, I was curious to make vocal patterns that were sort of oceanic. My music is very much about structure, whereas Matthew is much more abstract. I have to have a map and a compass to see the . nal point before I start the journey, and then I can meet 10 lions or whatever. (Telegraph interview, 21/07/2005)

- Björk

About Drawing Restraint 9 (2005): "Trying to even start to explain the film is kind of challenging, but with my little alcohol-pickled brain, it`s really tough. I guess that`s the point with the way Matthew sets it up, because there is no story. You just have to sit there and enjoy it, a bit like nature. The film has a narrative, but a really abstract one. It`s not your average Hollywood movie, let`s put it that way." (Telegraph interview, 21/07/2005)

- Björk

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

- Penelope Lively

National Standards was not a narrative of past events but was leftwing revisionism and Political Correctness.

- Phyllis Schlafly

I think that if you have a strong narrative, if the idea of the song can be boiled down to the basics, it won`t change that much.

- Suzanne Vega

...I studied English Literature. I wasn`t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

- Christopher Nolan

Every medium has to be redeveloped, otherwise we would still be looking at cave paintings ... My desire to tell you stories is very strong but it`s difficult because I am looking for cinema that is non-narrative.

- Peter Greenaway

I will throw all my best efforts into it, my thoughts and political observations, but ultimately I want to create a narrative that keeps you turning the pages and leaves you with a sense that this thing has a reason for being there.

- Frank Miller

My father, who was a doctor, died of pancreatic cancer. But he was clear about what he wanted done and not done. No hospitals, no invasive surgeries. He had a living will, which is like a narrative of your life that you get to finish. It was his legacy -- what he wanted to leave his family: emotionally, financially, spiritually.

- Carlos Gómez

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

- Robert Morgan

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

- Robert Morgan

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.

- Robert Morgan

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

- Sidney Sheldon

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that`s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

- Paul Auster

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

- James Luca McBride

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- Larry Thomas

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer`s creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.

- Laura Hillenbrand

I thought they`d cast some interesting light on the beginning of my career, especially with the introductions I wrote for them. It was a real nostalgia trip, all right. As for picking the stories, I chose the ones that seemed still to stand up for modern readers, so long as they didn`t expect state-of-the-art 21st-century narrative.

- Robert Silverberg

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there`s only narrative.

- E.L. Doctorow

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

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

- Jon Ronson

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

- Scott Turow

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.

- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

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

- Aleksander Suglobov

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.

- Alexei Arbatov

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

- Alisha Marquette

I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.

- Andreas Marx

an insider`s narrative account of the Hurricane Katrina disaster that will locate its roots in the culture and politics of the city of New Orleans and in the national politics of oil, homeland security, poverty and race relations.

- Andy Penman

The concept has promise, but, as often happens in Mr. Gilliam`s movies, the narrative gets gummed up with his labored surrealism. ? The movie ? has some interesting visual imagery (including gratuitous bugs), but any one of the old wives the Grimm brothers interviewed was a better storyteller.

- Andy Shoop

At that point I had a real 30-year narrative to sink my teeth into.

- Arnaud de Borchgrave

That`s what it`s supposed to do--speak truth to power. I`m not surprised by this...hip-hop tells the micro history, but it also tells the counter-history to the official narrative.

- Arnaud de Borchgrave

We inherited a site with a large, bunker-like structure and made every attempt to weave it into the narrative of the project. The lower portion of the building, with its militaristic past, represents the first portion of Rabin`s life as a warrior. The upper portion of the building, with its mission of education, its expansive views, and symbolic dove`s wings, represents the diplomat and mediator that he became.

- Audrey Johnson