Top Narrative Quotes

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

If you write then you are reborn because by writing about the moment, you can relive it for a second time.

Narrative Definition

(a.) Of or pertaining to narration; relating to the particulars of an event or transaction.

(a.) Apt or inclined to relate stories, or to tell particulars of events; story-telling; garrulous.

(n.) That which is narrated; the recital of a story; a continuous account of the particulars of an event or transaction; a story.

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . .. . . (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ev...

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every tim...

Then the front doorbell (already too long delayed by my rambling narrative) rang.

The Princess BrideS. Morgenstern'sClassic Tale of True Loveand High AdventureYou had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone had a chance to read it.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nine...

It might be most dramatically effective to begin the tale at the moment when Arnold Baffin rang me up and said, Bradley, could you come round here please, I think I have just killed my wife.

What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety tha...

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and...

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel,...

When she smiles, the lines in her face become epic narratives that trace the stories of generations that no book can replace.

I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity...

The most powerful words in English are, Tell me a story.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story a...