Narrative Quotes - Page 33

• Television has accustomed us to brief, intimate, telegraphic, visual, narrative messages. Candidates are learning to act, speak, and think in television's terms. In the process they are transforming speeches, debates, and their appearances in news into ads.

  Kathleen Hall Jamieson

  Thinking, News, Television

  Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1993). “Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy”, p.206, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

  Nic Pizzolatto

  Teaching, Writing, Class

  "True voice brings 'True Detective' to life". Interview with Christopher Borrelli, www.chicagotribune.com. January 22, 2014.

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• 'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut.

  Mark Doty

  Beautiful, Horse, Powerful

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• To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the narrator, to desire itself, or to lack? This is a work of complexly, ambiguously layered narratives and identities. The opening poem asserts I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories. These lines become an ars poetica for the whole of this painful and exceptional collection in which the unspeakable is stubbornly confronted by a searing eloquence. This is a commanding debut.

  Lynn Emanuel

  Book, Desire, Identity

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• For me, the main inspiration to write a story or novel is the voice of its central character, or the narrative voice of the story itself.

  Scott Bradfield

  Inspiration, Writing, Character

  "Go Forth (Vol. 15)". Interview with Brandon Hobson, logger.believermag.com. September 10, 2013.

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• I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

  Rachel Cusk

  Artist, Thinking, Culture

  "Go Forth (Vol. 34)". The Believer Interview, logger.believermag.com. June 17, 2015.

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• Screenwriting involves an often un-personal process. Co-writers, directors, producers, everyone has a say in what you put on a page, and stories are constantly changing according to budget, actors, and commercial needs. Films are a collaborative process and are also inherently narrative and structured, so you are always working within very tight parameters. Short fiction unleashes a more intimate voice and a passion for language. I believe short narratives can have the same amount of danger and drama as any action film.

  Chiara Barzini

  Drama, Believe, Passion

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• 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, Tvs, News

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing. So what I know about writing, I know from my own instincts, and whatever the narrative voice is in my own head.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Writing, School, College

  Interview with James Mustich, www.csmonitor.com. November 24, 2008.

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• The study of everything that stands connected with the death of Christ, whether it be in the types of the ceremonial law, the predictions of the prophets, the narratives of the gospels, the doctrines of the epistles, or the sublime vision of the Apocalypse, this is the food of the soul, the manna from heaven, the bread of life. This is "meat indeed" and "drink indeed."

  John Angell James

  Bread Of Life, Law, Heaven

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 69, 1895.

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• On the face of it, these look like bad times for Labour and for Ed Miliband's leadership. There seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy. Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour's record in all the wrong ways: we didn't spend too much money, we'll cut less fast and less far, but we can't tell you how.

  Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman

  Cutting, Shadow, Energy

  New Statesman, January 5, 2012.

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• Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul.

  Bruno Schulz

  Soul, Together, Ordinary

  Bruno Schulz, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Goldfarb (2008). “The street of crocodiles and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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• 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, Should

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• At length weariness succeeds to labor, and the mind lies at ease in the contemplation of her own attainments without any desire of new conquests or excursions. This is the age of recollection and narrative; the opinions are settled, and the avenues of apprehension shut against any new intelligence; the days that are to follow must pass in the inculcation of precepts already collected, and assertion of tenets already received; nothing is henceforward so odious as opposition, so insolent as doubt, or so dangerous as novelty.

  Samuel Johnson

  Lying, Doubt, Mind

  Samuel Johnson (2003). “Selected Essays”, p.380, Penguin UK

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• I believe in tension and release, in that if you stay in the the same tone and mode and intensity for too long, it actually becomes monotonous. When you change up your pace or your humour level, then the release is welcome... I believe that's my biggest job: tone control, and maintaining enough unity so that it all feels like one movie and all the scenes belong together, and yet diversity so that emotional and narrative interest is maintained.

  Patricia Rozema

  Jobs, Believe, Emotional

  "Audio Commentary with Writer/Director Patricia Rozema". "Mansfield Park" DVD, 2000.

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• Films are fantastic - they are one of the peaks of human narrative. But I'm sorry to break the news to the movie industry: So is a video game.

  Guillermo del Toro

  Sorry, Games, Video

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• This variety of objects will suspend, for some time, the course of the narrative; but the interruption will be censured only by those readers who are insensible to the importance of laws and manners, while they peruse, with eager curiosity, the transient intrigues of a court, or the accidental event of a battle.

  Edward Gibbon

  Law, History, Curiosity

  Edward Gibbon, Henry Hart Milman, M. Guizot (François), William Smith (1872). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.197

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• The simple circumstantial narrative (did such a narrative exist) of the ruin of a single town, of the misfortunes of a single family, might exhibit an interesting and instructive picture of human manners; but the tedious repetition of vague and declamatory complaints would fatigue the attention of the most patient reader.

  Edward Gibbon

  Simple, History, Interesting

  Edward Gibbon (1828). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.410

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• I totally accept that it's a legitimate criticism that when you are involved in the day-to-day scrum of government that what can get lost is the narrative, the hymn sheet the song that inspires and lifts people's sights.

  Nick Clegg

  Song, Government, Sight

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• Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

  A. S. Byatt

  A.S. Byatt (1997). “Still Life”, p.62, Simon and Schuster

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• Ones teachers all belonged to that generation who were imperialists, and the whole narrative throughout my adolescence was of countries leaving the empire. I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us.

  Jeremy Paxman

  Country, Teacher, Leaving

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• 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.

  Brian Selznick

  Thinking, Age, Cameras

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• An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.

  Steven Pinker

  Events, Way, Virtue

  "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". Book by Steven Pinker, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2011.

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• Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

  William Zinsser

  Moving, Style, Clarity

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

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Shapes, Nonfiction

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