Narrative Quotes - Page 33

• Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

  Ann Leckie

  Together, Identity, Ordinary

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• The biggest misconception is that I'm only a documentary filmmaker, but in fact I have made many narrative shorts. My biggest inspirations are narrative films, and that's ultimately where I see myself going next.

  Alex Hammond

  Inspiration, Next, Documentaries

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different.

  David Adjaye

  Brother, Art, Museums

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I do feel that scripts get developed now to a point where they're sort of actor-proof. If the actor is not very good, the narrative still survives because it's all in the dialogue. Not to say there aren't great performances in English-language films, because there are every year, but the 1970s were awash with great performances, and I was wondering whether it had to do with the amount of space and the amount of responsibility given to the actors.

  Paul Bettany

  Responsibility, Years, Space

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I've learned a lot about language from reading slush. You can immediately tell if a writer is in control of the narrative. This writer will avoid using too many words like "possibly," "probably," "maybe," "perhaps," etc. He/she will avoid using clichés, as well as a lot of metaphors, and won't take four sentences to say what they could in one (or write a great sentence and follow it up with a bunch of stuff that just weakens it).

  Mary J. Miller

  Reading, Writing, Four

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

  Chris Abani

  Book, Fiction, Scar

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

  Chris Abani

  Art, Reality, Risk

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• Narrative is a very feeble weapon in the face of human darkness and yet it's all we have. That we have to hang the transformation and survival of our species on the journey and transformation of one singular person so far outside of what we expect they can do.

  Chris Abani

  Journey, Darkness, Survival

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can.

  Chris Abani

  Fun, Book, Character

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

  Chris Abani

  Holocaust, Historical, Ordinary

  "The Rumpus Interview With Chris Abani". Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

  Regina Spektor

  Thinking, Stories, Life Is

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• A good mixtape didn't just gather together a bunch of love songs, but instead created an emotional narrative specific to your affection. The stories in most of my favorite collections are collected more like songs on a mixtape than, say, collected like spare change. By which I mean they are in conversation with each other and work to become larger than their parts.

  Anthony Marra

  Song, Mean, Emotional

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I tend to employ braided narrative threads in the lyric, so often echoes (of phrases or images) will occur and will hit my ear so I can shape different resonances and shifts in tone.

  Anna Journey

  Echoes, Different, Phrases

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Because I love narrative but am more lyrically inclined, I've learned that if I freight titles with narrative information (the who, what, when, where, why of the poem), I can get to my main interest, which is the language, and where it wants to take me. If I can establish the poem's occasion in the title, then so much the better for my freedom to associate.

  Anna Journey

  Titles, Want, Information

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else.

  John Dufresne

  Taken, Thinking, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• You could be attached to merely a description of a plant or a flower. Or a narrative of an event. Or rage at injustice. Isaiah and the other Hebrew prophets, in their rage, were being altogether attached - not at all detached, although as I think of the word "detachment," I also think of a sheet of paper, loose from its notebook, fluttering around somewhere in the wind trying to find its home again.

  Gerald Stern

  Notebook, Flower, Home

  Source: therumpus.net

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• For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren't.

  Roy Kesey

  Writing, Mean, Order

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa's dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between "us" and "them" to arrive at a "we."

  Brian Lindstrom

  Thinking, Bridges, Grandpa

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In documentary you sometimes see the tyranny of the linear, but what I've noticed in the last ten years in narrative film is the tyranny of the non-linear.

  Brian Lindstrom

  Years, Lasts, Documentaries

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Documentary filmmaking has all the challenges and hardships of narrative filmmaking without any of the infrastructure or support. That's both a blessing and a curse.

  Brian Lindstrom

  Blessing, Support, Challenges

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When you have the national narrative being "crack is awful and black people are using it," why go against that narrative when you want to get that publication in The New York Times or wherever? It encourages people to play right into it.

  Carl Hart

  New York, Play, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've gotten used to spending more time with heavily narrative stories.

  Joshuah Bearman

  Stories, Used, More Time

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I don't think that the people in my stories are lying to themselves. Well, some of them are - everybody is at some level. But there is something about how they all inhabit a narrative of their own making.

  Joshuah Bearman

  Lying, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I really think of my motives, my melodies, my harmonies, as being these things that are very much alive. They have these little lives of their own that are stretched and pulled, and I do conceive of my music in a very narrative way.

  Missy Mazzoli

  Thinking, Alive, Littles

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There's some ambient music that doesn't do anything. I wouldn't say that that's narrative. It is narrative in that it creates a sort of world where nothing happens, where really nothing happens, so you become a different person after hearing eight minutes of exactly the same thing. Yes, I hear music all the time in which one idea is strung together to another idea, and I feel that such music is non-narrative.

  Missy Mazzoli

  Eight, Ideas, Together

  Source: therumpus.net

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