Top 390 Narrative Quotes

You can’t understand what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, you can’t understand what happened to Eric Garner in New York City, without understanding this narrative of racial difference that was created during the slave years.

There’s a classic medical aphorism: ‘Listen to the patient; they’re telling you the diagnosis.’ Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.

One of the things I’ve been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it’s some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.

As soon as I left Georgia, my narrative became about taking risks and the fight for creative bedroom artists with no platform.

I know when it comes to the actual narrative of my solo music, it’s its own thing. That’s why I went out of my way after ‘Crew’ to not do a bunch of collaborations.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

When we embraced social media, we took more control of the Newark narrative. We increased responsiveness toward residents. We drew more of our constituents in to participate in government and improve our cities.

Most of my films have been documentaries, but I’m also very interested in narrative filmmaking.

I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction.

The great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude or forced labor. I really believe that the true evil of American slavery was the narrative of racial difference that we created to justify it.

I’m not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

‘Atlanta’ is Wild West-y – every corner of the city is trying to get by under its own rules. There’s no single narrative. At the outer edges, the overgrown parking lots and project blocks, the city is a few yards away from apocalypse, and if you slow down, it could engulf you.

People always said during the Monday Night Wars that the only way we were able to compete was due to a large checkbook and deep pockets. That’s not very true at all. That is a false narrative designed to shape history. WWE had significant advantages over WCW and vice versa.

As a writer, I had learned a lot on ‘Margin Call’ about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.

The whole narrative of the ‘Return to the Land’ was completely PR spin. Fans ate it up because it painted LeBron as the hero coming back to save Cleveland from obscurity.

The unsaid is a powerful tool. It invites the reader into the narrative, filling in gaps, interpreting silences and half-finished sentences, and seeing the hidden fear in someone’s eye.

I think the media has portrayed conservatives as these cold, heartless people who want poor people to die and let half the population starve and all this. They’ve done that so effectively because they’ve owned the narrative for so long.

The two have to go hand in hand – the atmosphere and the music. I actually get rather worried if I can’t see the music first. There always needs to be a mood, a feeling, a story, even if it is abstract. There’s got to be a narrative to guide things before they’re even created.

The gender is irrelevant; the identity is the one you should try and create for yourself by yourself, and the narrative of your own life becomes your own book.

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

Narrative identity takes part in the story’s movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It’s just great to let other people carry the narrative.

Even ‘Piku’ was quite an experiment in terms of storytelling because on the surface nothing happens in the film. If you ask me what was the film about, it was about father-daughter fighting and the narrative captured their daily life.

Each country has its own way of communicating a narrative and, through that, expressing family experiences in emotional stories.

I’ve always been a little more narrative, a little more linear, a little more direct. People instantly want to classify that as something retro. It’s just a way of writing songs.

I’ve seen ‘Goodfellas’ a hundred times, and one of the things that I take away from that movie is dynamic pacing and energy. I just think that film is sort of a paragon of excellence in filmmaking and the compression of narrative.

The GOP doesn’t seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative.

It would be unthinkable to have a top-ten list of multiple narrative novels that doesn’t include David Mitchell. ‘Cloud Atlas’ is the most obvious choice, but I have opted for Mitchell’s slightly lesser known debut, ‘Ghostwritten.’

I do love Shirley Jackson, but I don’t deserve to be named in connection with her. I remember reading ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and having goosebumps for hours. The way she builds narrative pressure in that book is just amazing. I think you could reread it a few times and actually go out of your mind.

I see the world as voices, as colors, as it were. From book to book, I change, the subjects change, but the narrative thread remains the same.

Writing children’s books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

I did grow up in a household where the narrative was about public service and how are you going to effect change and help people. I’m so glad I grew up around that narrative, but I never had the calling to go out and shake hands and try to get elected.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel… you have to listen to it.

We just assumed that Walter Cronkite was unbiased. In hindsight, it is clear that Walter Cronkite was biased and that he used feigned objectivity as the cudgel to change the American narrative from being a right of center one to being a left of center one.

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

I’m interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion.

Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie – ‘Casablanca,’ say – and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.

I’m interested in ways that digital interfaces can be utilized as powerful narrative devices, and to engage people in new and exciting ways.

When you have a child, you think about your personal history and what you offer them as a larger narrative, and I realised I knew nothing about my father’s circumstances other than what he’d told me.

When I was growing up, I never saw couples fight on the family sitcoms I loved to watch. Subsequently, when tough times arose in my own relationship, I wasn’t prepared and felt so isolated and alone. Marital issues weren’t a part of the narrative that television told me was a ‘working relationship.’

To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.

In fact, it is my case that POFMA can easily become a proverbial Damocles sword that would hang over members of the public who do not support the government’s narrative or toe the government’s line.

I think the mix of narrative and analysis that the ‘New Yorker’ requires is a perfect expression of what my parents each gave me.

The work I did on ‘Killing Kennedy’ was very meticulous and, in some ways, actually tedious. It was hard work because there is so much known about John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. To try to distill that into a clear narrative that’s interesting and tells two great stories was a real challenge.

President Obama is a poker player, which the media used as part of the narrative that he was more calculated and careful as a politician.

My songs used to be significantly more bizarre. I used to play a big electric piano and a loop pedal. I was really into Regina Spektor, and I liked her narrative lyrics that were quite off the wall. I used to layer things up and try and replicate what I’d been doing with my bedroom recordings.