Narrative Quotes - Page 21

• Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

  Paul Theroux

  Travel, Memorable, Stories

  Paul Theroux (2011). “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, p.66, Penguin UK

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• Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.

  Charles Baxter

  Writing, Friendly, Want

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• Yet, I had nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing.

  Charles Dickens

  Reading, Believe, Writing

  "David Copperfield". Volume I,

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• We need a change in consciousness to go with this technology platform. We need a new narrative: we need to shift from geopolitics to biosphere consciousness in one generation. The biosphere is understood here as what goes from the biosphere to the depths of the ocean 40 miles where all living beings interact with all chemicals to create a very complex choreography that we call "life on earth". That is biosphere that is our indivisible community.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Ocean, Technology, Community

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• Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

  Mark Twain

  Circles, Two, Stories

  Mark Twain (2016). “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain”, p.55, Chartwell

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• Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

  John Fowles

  Children, Real, Writing

  John Fowles (1985). “A Maggot”, Jonathan Cape

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• Now [Sue Grafton] loves writer's block, seeing it as a message from the psyche that the narrative is headed in the wrong direction.

  Colleen O'Connor

  Block, Writing, Messages

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• Characters last. Beautiful writing lasts. A compelling narrative lasts. Art survives long after ideas go extinct.

  Joel Achenbach

  Beautiful, Art, Writing

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• I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly. My wish is for the narrative in the pictures to work within that circumstance. It is that sense of in-between-ness that interests me.

  Gregory Crewdson

  Twilight, Wish, Quality

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• Somebody once asked me if I have anything like faith, and I said I have faith in the narrative. I have a belief in a narrative that is bigger than me, that is alive and I trust will work itself out.

  Joss Whedon

  Alive, Have Faith, Belief

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• A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry Malick himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

  Sean Penn

  Impact, Trying, Add

  "Sean Penn on The Tree of Life: 'Terry never managed to explain it clearly'" by Ben Child, www.theguardian.com. August 22, 2011.

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• Packed with interwoven personal narratives which the author ties together to show the fragility and molding of Buryat memory and Buryat shamanism's purpose during the transition from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism in Mongolia. . . . Buyandelger has created an emotive, accessible, and well-researched ethnography sure to arouse sympathy and interest in readers.

  Michael Warren

  Memories, Ties, Together

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• American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

  Steven Soderbergh

  Real, Character, Thinking

  "Steven Soderbergh Hints at Switch to Television". www.hollywoodreporter.com. June 29, 2012.

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• To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

  Roger Ebert

  Dream, Spring, Secret

  Roger Ebert (2005). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2006”, p.734, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• Well, let’s start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it’s not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling.
  The story you are telling is only as good as the information in it: things you elicit, or things you observe, that make a narrative come alive; things that support your point not just through assertion, but through example; quotes that don’t just convey information, but also personality.

  Gene Weingarten

  Writing, Vocabulary, Dancing

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• The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater, and is closer to music. It’s abstract but still narrative. Everything feels less rehearsed. It’s more experimental than classical.

  Emmanuel Lubezki

  Language, Film, Abstract

  "Immersed in Movies: Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki Climbs ‘The Tree of Life’" by Bill Desowitz, www.indiewire.com. February 10, 2012.

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• As for the heart
  It needs a beginning
  The narrative
  Burden of events

  Fady Joudah

  Heart, Events, Needs

  Interview with Jon Riccio, poetry.arizona.edu. February 12, 2015.

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• Our response to the world is essentially one of wonder, of confronting the mysterious with a sense, not of being small, or insignificant, but of being part of a rich and complex narrative.

  John Burnside

  World, Mysterious, Wonder

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• I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

  George Hickenlooper

  Movie, Art, Thinking

  "Rise and Fall on the Sunset Strip; George Hickenlooper Finds His “Zelig” with L.A. DJ Rodney Bingenh". Interview with Wendy Mitchell, www.indiewire.com. March 26, 2004.

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• Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

  Ian Mcewan

  Information, Tension, Withholding

  "The Background Hum" by Daniel Zalewski, www.newyorker.com. February 23,2009.

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• Fantasy is, at its best, the purest access to storytelling that we have. It universalizes a tale, it evokes wonder and timeless narrative power, it touches upon inner journeys, it illuminates our collective and individual pasts, throws a focus beam on the present day, and presages the dangers and promises of the future.

  Guy Gavriel Kay

  Past, Journey, Focus

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• If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

  Ian Fleming

  Book, Writing, Self

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• Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.

  Clive James

  Diaries, Philosopher, Boring

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• Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.

  Garry Winogrand

  Photography, Light, Photographer

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• In our current society, it is considered a weakness to be female and a treason to protest this. Highlighting inequality results in aggressive insults and threats, all of which are propped up by the repeated narrative now that women are 'playing the gender card'. And this is the final insult. That of all the unfair things associated with women - the violence and insults, the financial oppression, the very undermining of our worth as human beings - it is the acknowledgement of these inequalities that gives us some kind of unfair advantage over the men who benefit from them.

  Clementine Ford

  Women, Giving, Benefits

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