Narrative Quotes

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
Hilary Mantel

Work, Good, May

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

Writing, Dramatic, Poets

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

Long, Read, Known

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
Ian Mcewan

Flow, Charge, Novelists

Partnerships are good engines for narrative.
Tommy Lee Jones

My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you're not strictly bound to a linear narrative.
Tommy Lee Jones

Life, Future, Past

The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism,' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.
Tony Kushner

Success, Mean, Sense

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

Government, Lost, Accept

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

History, Gossip, Become

Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.
Carter Burwell

Music, Film, Films

It's a wonderful narrative device to bring someone from the outside and look through his eyes if you want to describe the absurdity and preposterous reality that is accepted amongst the ones who are inside.
Christoph Waltz

Someone, Reality, Through

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
Terry Eagleton

Work, Home, Character

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

Reality, Two, Pretty

I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular.
Alexander Payne

Life, Movies, Real

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.
Jane Campion

Power, Struggle, Big

The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature.
Sol LeWitt

Music, Art, Literature

A continuing narrative throughout Australia's history that says it is better to build up than to tear down - this is the continuing mission of Labor.
Kevin Rudd

History, Down, Labor

I believe we all have different ways we came to the gay community and we can't and shouldn't be pigeon-holed into one cultural narrative which can be uninclusive and disempowering.
Cynthia Nixon

Gay, Different, Community

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

Past, Political, National

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.
Hilary Mantel

Book, Together, Different

Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.
Hilary Mantel

Change, Character, Important

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

Poetry, Decision, Write

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

Great, Art, Poetry

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.
Anthony Horowitz

Strong, End, Writing

I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That's what I want to do.
Tommy Lee Jones

Put, Tell, Actor

Today, Labour has a disruptive economic narrative - that Britain needs fundamental change in its market structure and culture to compete in the modern world.
David Miliband

Change, Today, Culture

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

Best, Political, Thoughts

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

Tell, Easy, Used

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
Don DeLillo

True, Deep, Used

That decision to commit your life to certain principles and a certain narrative, if I wrote a paper on that, I know I'd find inconsistencies.
Matt Stone

Life, Decision, Find

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