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

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.
Barbara Kruger

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.
Lascelles Abercrombie

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
Terry Zwigoff

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.
John Drinkwater

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

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.
Griffin Dunne

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

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.
Paul Ricoeur

For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.
Michael I. Rostovtzeff

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.
Nicholas Mosley

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

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.
James Gunn

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.
Diane Wakoski

I hear music as narrative.
Ajay Naidu

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

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.
Sidney Sheldon

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.
James Gunn

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
Brian Eno

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