Narrative Quotes

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.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.

The Princess Bride
S. Morgenstern's
Classic Tale of True Love
and High Adventure

You 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.

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.

We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment - narrative catechisms.

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

We want the author to give us answers when all he can do is give us desires.

«Non è una frase genuina» protestai. «I mi spiace autentici sono di un rosa più tenue».
Arricciò le labbra. «Ma sono anche troppo fragili». Stando a quanto avevo letto, era vero. La rarità era dovuta anche alla loro fragilità. Era facile danneggiarli o distruggerli. «Quella è un'ottima copia» disse, indicandola con l'indice.

«Non tutte le parole sono precipitate al suolo» disse Lucio, trovando infine il coraggio di guardarmi negli occhi.
Mi sforzai di dire qualcosa. «No?»
«No» continuò, il volto ammorbidito. Era sollevato che avessi deciso di aprire bocca. «Sembra che alcune parole siano più pesanti di altre».

A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing…sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

Readers don't want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions. . . . Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face down unimaginable terrors, to solve impossible puzzles, to feel a lightning jolt of adrenaline.