We’ve collected the best Narrative Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Emily Thornberry, Andrew Breitbart, Diane Wakoski, Susanna Kearsley, Daniel Woodrell. Use them as an inspiration.
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I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I’ve always responded to that notion.
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned the narrative around on demonetisation very quickly by promoting the move as one way of ending systemic corruption in the country.
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The stoic drama ‘A Somewhat Gentle Man’ is photographed in a palate of steel gray tones that match Stellan Skarsgard’s complexion. It’s a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal.
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People have to respond to the characters and respond to the situations that they’re in. That said, it still has to be a compelling narrative that drives along and keeps people coming back week after week. So really, with any successful show you could name, there has to be a mysterious blend of both of those.
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I always respected country music for its narrative and how it’s so solid, you can get the picture in your mind.
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Over the years, I learned that in my career, unlike in life, sometimes my wheelchair is its own automatic door opener. I was able to win the OWN competition by applying one simple principle: be funny, and admit you suck before anyone else can call you out on it. In other words, make the narrative of your failure a comedy.
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The only consistency in the work I do is that I try to use cinematography to best tell the narrative and do justice to the character arcs, but not to do it in such an overt way that people are distracted by it.
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Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
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If you go back far enough and get a wider enough picture of history, we have let go of many things that follow a religious narrative. We don’t burn witches anymore. Most people would consider that barbaric. We don’t sacrifice human beings, which was a religious act practiced by numerous cultures on this planet.
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I was never raised with the traditional story of creation in religion, and because of that I think I had a lot of questions. And evolution, the evolutionary narrative, helped provide some of that for me.
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I always tend to think, even in residential projects, about what a space is being asked to do – where is it located, what are the circumstances, where can I attack the problem, so to speak. How can you create a narrative for people moving through it? How can you convey its character?
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We need a new and positive narrative that defies the negativity and transforms our ageing populations from a problem into an asset.
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There’s something about that puritanical narrative of progress and upward mobility and work ethic that the glorification of abstinence fits pretty neatly into. That pairs with the fact that 12-step recovery has had too large a monopoly on how treatment is understood in America.
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The only books I give up on are texts where the writer’s attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.
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The repetition of the victimhood narrative is really poisonous for young people because they hear it and believe it.
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I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I’d be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn’t good at science. I didn’t have the discipline for it.
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I feel like handling a narrative in fiction is a wonderful way to teach stories that then open a pathway to reality and understanding.
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You can have all the intentions you want and try and guide the narrative, but the narrative is irrelevant because it’s how the public digests it that will be indicative of what the series will ultimately be.
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We are in this amazing age of television where there’s an incredible amount and an incredible quality of television, of long-form narrative.
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VCs are used to being the gatekeepers of capital. There’s this old narrative of entrepreneurs going hat in hand begging VCs for money. That absolutely is not the world we’re in anymore.
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I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort of narrative, and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.
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National Standards was not a narrative of past events but was leftwing revisionism and Political Correctness.
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Strong female characters – even if they don’t necessarily make the same decisions that we might – make such great narrative material, especially when there’s an equally strong male character in the mix.
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I think the mix of narrative and analysis that the ‘New Yorker‘ requires is a perfect expression of what my parents each gave me.
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Because I write fiction, I don’t write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as ‘I’ – you are inhabiting that ‘I.’
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Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.
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As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative – as watching someone else’s story – and much more toward enacting one’s own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
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Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there’s a multitude of different endings.
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Most of my films have been documentaries, but I’m also very interested in narrative filmmaking.
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Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.
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I write short, my words tight to the thread of the narrative.
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I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.
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I think my narrative is actually pretty interesting if I step back from it and don’t engage too much in it, personally or emotionally.
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One of the things that defines YA is a really strong narrative. Adults love YA because, at the end of the day, they’re good stories and page-turners. The other element is emotion. The teen years are a very emotional and intense time, and I think it’s a time we that we can all relate to and remember.
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I think our everyday coded language around ‘good neighborhoods‘ and ‘bad neighborhoods’ is what allows for tremendous violence to happen… When you label a neighborhood ‘bad’ and avoid it, then you don’t know and don’t see what goes on there. And there’s no human face to interrupt that narrative.
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If you break things down to goodies and baddies, the baddies are always a bit more alluring in fiction, and that’s true from a narrative point of view. But I wanted to write a novel about real life, and real life is a bit more nuanced than that.
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I tell my students that the single most powerful thing that we have in this country – something that literally harbors no dissent and no questioning – is the all-powerful elite narrative.
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It’s still a political statement to stand on stage as a person of color and be excellent. We still need those images to combat the narrative we’re often fed – as someone innately inferior or inexorably linked with lack.
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‘Lucky Life’ is my second narrative film. I worked on the idea for ‘Lucky Life’ while in Rwanda for my first film.
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There is a narrative of ‘Washington fighting‘ because it’s interesting and it’s drama.
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The narrative of ‘man the hunter‘ presupposes that men provided the nutrition, invented the tools, and established social organization and communication through the hunt, and that women were just sitting by the fire waiting for evolution to drag them out by the hair in the 1960s in order to participate.
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When I started making music I wanted it to have a narrative and be conceptual, but as time went on I thought it was probably more practical for a first album just to have good music.
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The body of work I create combines traditional storylines and postmodern narrative strategies to approach themes such as belonging, identity politics and conflict, as well as the push towards – and resistance against – modernization.
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The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is ‘real,’ and so I thought, ‘I’ll base it on the absurd, the not real. I’ll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I’ll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.’
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The ‘Grace of Kings’ isn’t a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent, and only lurches toward more justice.
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I’ve been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at ‘This American Life,’ it’s how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.
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What I’m really proud of Beyonce and Solange, they understand the importance of creating the narrative. It’s all about the narrative and how you position yourself with your narrative.
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As the cinema is changing, on-screen kissing, love-making scenes are becoming part of the narrative. I am not saying it is wrong, because it is the reflection of how our society has changed and become comfortable with it. But I am uncomfortable performing it on screen.
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I think when you go in, with film or television, you want to tell this narrative. And with ‘Joshy,’ you want it to be grounded with moments – it’s not like, ‘Everyone be as funny as you can, quickly, at all times!’ It’s not like that. You have to pick the right improvisers.
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Documentaries can provoke much more than narrative movies.
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Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.
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An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.
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I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can’t do in movies, and vice-versa.
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I’m interested in discontinuities and interruptions, people having to rewrite the narrative of their lives because of sudden changes.
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A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That’s a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes… a show like ‘Breaking Bad‘ is astonishing.
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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.
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It’s something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can’t even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.
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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.’
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What you’re trying to create is a certain kind of an indispensable presence, where your position in the narrative is not contingent on whether somebody likes you, or somebody knows you, or somebody’s a friend, or somebody’s being generous to you.
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I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that ‘the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history’ – a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.
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Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don’t.
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When I started making dances in the ’60s, narrative dance was sort of off the radar screen. What was important at the time in the avant-garde was minimalism.
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It’s probably why I’m a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
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There’s what we call the ‘critical path,’ which is the main story line and all the missions that you have to do to complete the narrative arc of the game. Then there are side quests. They’re not essential to completing the game.
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Memory doesn’t come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.
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Whether politicians are dealing with complex policy problems or trying to communicate with the electorate, it makes sense to establish a clear, long term narrative underpinned by forward-looking policies to deliver on its vision.
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And the narrative for the Taliban that they can wait us out is a flawed narrative. I think that the unambiguous international support for Afghanistan has been a very powerful message. You know, that was the message that came out of the NATO summit. We will not abandon Afghanistan.
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I look at scripts, and sometimes I apply theory to them. For ‘Antiviral,’ for example, I was reading Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ and it was all about the psychological process by which we fetishize the female image. It’s all about scopophilia.
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Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more – the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.
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Biggie and Big Pun were the best storytellers of the ’90s. I would get wrapped up in the narrative of what they were talking about.
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In reality, girls make mistakes, and it’s not fair to keep presenting this narrative that they’re perfect.
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I haven‘t had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn’t hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean – at least in my case.
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Cable television is such a part of our society now. Oftentimes, the shows are really good, and you’re just like, ‘Well, it’s worth sitting through the sex and violence because the narrative is so great.’
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I want the camerawork to fit the narrative and tell the story from the point of view of the character, but sometimes, to be interacting with the sensations of the story, you almost become like a ghost, you know? Like, someone that is floating, observing, not really judging what’s going on.
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We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you’ve actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.
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A denial of the reality of demonical possessions on the part of anyone who believes the Gospel narrative to be true and inspired may justly be regarded as simply and plainly inconceivable.
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I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer’s creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.
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The thing I always tell my writing students – I’m not a full-time instructor, by any means, but periodically I’ve taught writing students – what I always tell them is that the most important thing in narrative nonfiction is that you not only have to have all the research; you have to have about 100% more than you need.
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I filmed my first narrative feature in 2006, a story set in Rwanda called ‘Munyurangabo.’
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I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn’t only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, ‘Shoot, eviction does that.’
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Dominant narrative is so overwhelming in politics. The smallest gaffe when the momentum is against you is a disaster. But when it is with you, everyone just ignores it.
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When you’re doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it’s a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche.
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Visual storytelling combines the narrative text of a story with creative elements to augment and enhance the traditional storytelling process. By design, it is a co-creative process resulting in an intimate, interpretive, expressive technique.
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When you sing on stage, the songs are part of the narrative, but in ‘Unconditional Love,’ it was just singing for singing’s sake. It was playing at being pop star. As a young boy growing up in North Wales, that was my fantasy.
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I think the whole narrative of blockchain without bitcoin will amount to very little.
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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.
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I don’t concentrate on any one period of history; I like to locate my stories in wildly different eras and places. I seem to be drawn to large, sprawling, uncomfortable swaths of American history, finding embedded within them a tight narrative that involves strife, heroism, and survival under difficult circumstances.
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Every good story needs a hero. Back when I wrote ‘The Search,’ that hero was Google – the book wasn’t about Google alone, but Google’s narrative worked to drive the entire story.
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At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
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I think that rap is narrative, when it’s done right.
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I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there’s always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
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There’s not one black narrative. There’s not one way to be black.
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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.
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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.
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Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It’s easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.
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The narrative needs to change. Asian-American actresses don’t want to be the damsels in distress anymore. We don’t want to be saved, especially by a white man.
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To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.
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I’m the first transsexual fighter in MMA. Like, ever. It’s always going to be part of the narrative, but I’ll deal with it. I’ll try my best to use it to my advantage.
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At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers‘ intellectual and emotional attention.
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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.
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‘Main Hoon Na’ will always be special since it was my first film but in my subsequent films, I was trying to show off with gimmicks that didn’t aid the narrative in any way.
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One’s teachers all belonged to that generation who were imperialists, and the whole narrative throughout my adolescence was of countries leaving the empire. I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us.
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‘Endgame‘ resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life – the audience.
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Facebook captures examples of inequality and makes them available for endless replay. Twitter links the voiceless to newsmakers. Instagram immortalizes the faces and consequences of discrimination. Isolated cruelties are yoked into a powerful narrative of marginalization that spurs a common cause.
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I know what the narrative is on me. It’s because I come from money and I have a swagger and confidence about me.
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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.
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One of the reasons why I think virtual reality, as a narrative format, is never going to go beyond the short-form immersion space is because the bedrock of visual storytelling is the reverse angle. If you can’t look into the eyes of the protagonist, you cannot hold people’s attention for more than 15 minutes.
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You’ve probably seen that any visible Palestinian-American woman who is at the forefront of any social-justice movement is an immediate target of the right wing and right-wing Zionists. They will go to any extreme to criminalize us and to engage in alternative facts, to sew together a narrative that does not exist.
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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.
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Nefertiti is lovely, but we should use our wit and will to look beyond that beautiful face to discover and to enjoy a more satisfying narrative – the story of mankind, not just of man.
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It’s great that I can look up a fact instantly on my cellphone, but I miss the days in my room with a dog-eared, text-heavy paperback, immersed in the statistics of crime and punishment and lunacy, completely alone with the narrative of human depravity.
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Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at ‘The New Yorker,’ wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, ‘Hiroshima.’ Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form.
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As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.
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Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.
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Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don’t use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing.
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I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters.
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You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don’t agree with that narrative.
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I used my instincts. It’s very easy to imagine how you’d feel, actually. I just had to tell the narrative.
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‘Happy Valley’ is an extraordinary piece and it was not necessarily about Catherine but her part in the narrative.
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People need a narrative, and if there isn’t one on offer, they make one up.
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Forecasting is simply not a strength of the species; we are much better with tools and narrative storytelling.
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The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can’t focus on longer narratives now – even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it’s an adventure film.
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You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people.
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Today, Labour has a disruptive economic narrative – that Britain needs fundamental change in its market structure and culture to compete in the modern world.
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The new narrative for Europe should be about the need to have a responsible organisation, the need to be able to defend our interests and promote our values, like human rights.
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Anytime you look at someone in detail, you’re putting the camera on that person. What I typically look for is one or two or three really strong characters who will hold the narrative throughout the work.
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My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters.
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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.
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A narrative that branded Africa as little more than an economic, political and social basket case was not likely to provide the investment needed to drive development.
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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.
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Referring to ISIL as a destructive religious cult rather than a legitimate theo-political ‘radical Islamic’ group is not just more accurate, it also exposes ISIL’s corrupt religious narrative.
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The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don’t. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don’t speak in dialogue. Their lives don’t unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.
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It’s hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you’re ultimately the author, so you do have control.
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I don’t believe that narrative works when it’s trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth.
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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.
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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.
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It’s what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It’s characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it’s OK to do that.
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Television has been breaking narrative rules.
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There’s no relationship to the narrative anymore. People want their own interpretation of history. We’re compartmentalizing, forgetting what came directly before, like it’s not a big deal. That, to me, is a crime.
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Generally speaking, we as black people have been celebrated more for when we are subservient when we are not being leaders or kings or in the center of our own narrative driving it forward.
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I can’t be bothered with narrative. It takes too long for me to try to think of it.
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By swallowing the false narrative of systemic racism, we have demonized and criminalized police while turning criminals into civil-rights martyrs.
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The Rafale deal narrative that the Congress is setting is a propaganda that has international ramifications.
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It’s really important for me to have a record which has a strong narrative feel to it.
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Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the ‘radicalization’ narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.
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The GOP doesn’t seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative.
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Fashion is this obsessive narrative that people don’t understand but they can’t stop looking at.
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The narrative often from Democrats and the media is that Republicans don’t think the Russians have meddled in our election. They did.
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Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.
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Our history is our own; it’s not America’s. Too often, those who campaign against racial inequality import wholesale a narrative and assumptions that have nothing to do with this country’s history and have no place on these islands.
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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.
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No other powerful public figure in the history of American media has controlled his narrative as effectively as David Stern.
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Any narrative, whether it’s fiction or not, you have to approach it as though it really happened to you. I think that’s the only way to get inside the characters and make the narrative work. It’s a storytelling tradition, and I think to come off as genuine then you have to really approach it that way.
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I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I’m trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn’t really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.
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Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can’t.
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If you need to fudge the facts a little bit to make your narrative work, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you.
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‘Betsy’ is one of my favorites because it is the one to which I’ve imposed the least clear narrative. To me, it’s so much more about the feeling – desperation – than any kind of story at all. There’s very little imagery or character development; it’s just about a deep and desperate search for something.
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Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.
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Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
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Life only has narrative when we frame it and edit it and call it certain things.
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I love to dress up and create a narrative with my look.
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For queer people, the personal is very political, just to talk about it in a public space. It’s very political just to come out and take up that space and be like, ‘This is my narrative. It’s not an outsider narrative, and it’s not a fetish narrative; it’s just my story, and it’s worth being told and listened to.’
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For narrative games, and also for the sake of the medium, we have to treat performance that way, as actors. You have to have a sense of ownership over it and believe that you’re bringing something meaningful to it – because that’s what all of the developers are doing, and that’s what the story demands.
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With the transcendent or supernatural, they help us contextualize our own lives while we are here on this earth. On a narrative level, as a storyteller, they are a wonderful tool and technique by which to explore those hopes, those fears, those existential dilemmas that we all face from time to time.
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We can all be cornered and victimized and bullied by someone who’s trying to take our contextual clues of our personality or appearance, the circumstantial, and trying to make that evidence to fit their narrative. That’s very scary.
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There’s a certain joy in taking a dramatic narrative and then adding that element of horror to it.
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As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.
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The experience that a publication creates for its audience is the very essence of that publication’s brand – and without deep engagement, that publication’s brand will be weak. A good publication is a convener and an arbiter – it expresses a core narrative that becomes a badge of sorts for its readership.
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Historically speaking, the books I usually connect with the most are written in first-person narrative.
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You look at ‘Arrested Development’ or ‘Community,’ we’re constantly either deconstructing genre or tone. We like to say it’s like being a mad scientist: you get to play in a laboratory and experiment with directions to take narrative in.
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There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
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Myself, there’s people saying, ‘He’ll never find himself in the halls of WWE.’ It’s a narrative that’s fueled more by secondhand fan myth than what people feel.
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I don’t know how video game narrative works.
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It’s almost like a theater, where I can play a character in every song, ’cause Kamelot songs are very… There’s always a narrative going on. There’s a story within albums and in songs, so I get to play a character and sing it in a different way than people might recognize coming from me.
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And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
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If a scene called for numerous Oompas to join in a narrative song and dance, I would perform the steps for all of them with subtle distinctions of expression and movement. When the images were joined with the help of a computer, I became an entire troupe.
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Films like ‘Velvet Goldmine’ are an accumulation of research and references. I create an almost random resource of connections and am constantly distilling that into narrative specifics.
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I think through humor you can get a point across better than through just a dramatic narrative.
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A lot of artists I like end up being queer. Or maybe it’s a subconscious thing that you can identify of, like, ‘Oh this person understands the nuances of the romantic narrative of a queer person, or the social narrative of a queer person.’ And then you discover, lo and behold that they are a queer person.
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Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative.
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I can’t see much purpose in archaeology unless you can find out the narrative about that place, or even realise that nobody actually knows what the narrative was.
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Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.
327
In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression – all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.
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Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.
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I’ve always enjoyed that kind of thing – thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don’t notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.
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My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
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One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.
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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.
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My narrative style centers around intimate, highly subjective depictions of personal experience and internal landscapes. In ‘March,’ everything fell into place as soon as I began identifying strongly with John Lewis as a young boy and saw how we shared the same kind of gravity and intensity as youngsters.
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Instead of going to a GLAAD event and standing on a soapbox, I am writing roles that I feel will change the narrative and open doors.
340
I think so many women allow themselves to be defined by somebody else’s narrative.
341
‘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.
342
My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
343
There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story.
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You can’t but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it’s a narrative art form.
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Oftentimes, as women and women of color, we are put as supporting characters in other people’s narratives. With ‘Jessica James’, she is the star of her own narrative.
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Narrative is so rich; it’s given up so much.
349
‘Rapper’s Delight’ came from the TV entertainment show ‘Good Times,’ but when the times called for a shift in the narrative, artists answered, covering brutal truths in their rhymes that were uncomfortable for society to confront.
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It’s so often that I read for the bouncy, sunny girl men fall in love with who will solve all the romantic problems in the narrative. I don’t choose to work that way.
352
That inner narrative – the desire to understand the way I am – never really switches off.
353
While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.
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The privilege, and the challenges, of taking on Black Widow have never been lost on me. I worked on the first ‘Spiderman’ game as well as ‘Fantastic Four,’ and I had always wanted to be able to tell more of a character-driven comic book story than was possible to fit into a game narrative.
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I’m about women’s empowerment. I’m about agency. I’m about being in control of your narrative and your body.
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Marriage fascinates me: how we negotiate its span, how we change within it, how it changes itself, and why some relationships survive and others do not. There isn’t a single marriage that couldn’t provide enough narrative arc for a novel.
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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.
363
I don’t mean to minimize Russia. They are a serious national security threat, but day in, day out, the threats that we face from China are significantly greater. Anyone who says otherwise is just politicizing intelligence for their own narrative.
364
I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
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While we can all access articles and information in so many places now – across blogs, in newspapers, on video – there is something very powerful about putting it all together into an edited format in a single issue that has a narrative stretching across the themes.
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Theater is great because you’re able to tell a narrative arc without a break. I think it’s more about the material and whether what we get offered is good.
371
If we were writing what the fans wanted to see, Betty and Jughead would be the most linear, monotonous narrative of all time.
372
Believe it or not, one of the things I try to do around here is try to look for opportunities to work with people across the aisle. I know that’s not the common narrative. But the truth is if you want to get anything done, that’s an absolute requirement.
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A big part of the anti-immigration narrative is the perception that the majority of immigrants are poor, uneducated, and unskilled.
375
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.
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Music is a big part of the director’s life; Ms. Coppola’s previous feature, a screen adaptation of ‘The Virgin Suicides,’ was informed more substantially by the score by the group Air than by the narrative.
377
‘Fast Food Nation’ isn’t about my journey into the dark world of fast food and the prison book is not about my journey into the prison world. I’m not using myself as any kind of narrative link.
378
Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There’s a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.
379
Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations – perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization.
380
When you’ve grown up with limited resources, there’s almost a narrative that everything’s unlikely and the odds are against you. I guess then, if things start to happen, you immediately think, ‘Do I even deserve this?’
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Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.
383
The narrative of so many fairy tales are timeless in so many different cultures, and they have been since the dawn of man. They represent escapism, but they all feature themes that have such poignancy in a modern world.
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One of the reasons why Gadafy’s dictatorship has managed to remain in power for so long is not just because it has shown itself to be able to exact a great deal of violence, both psychological and physical, on its people, but because it has been very successful at imposing a narrative, a story.
386
Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.
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There’s a bit more of a safe distance when you’re making a narrative movie, a bit more perspective. Audiences can separate themselves from the harsh reality of the facts a little bit more and think: ‘Okay, how do I consider this?’
389
A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because ‘Possession’ is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.
390
I wanted to fold into the ‘Hellraiser’ narrative something about the guy – the Frenchman Lemarchand – who made the mysterious box, which raises Pinhead. I figured, ‘Well, what would have happened to him?’ He might well have been taken to Devil’s Island, and I thought that would be a pretty cool place to start the movie.
391
We understand that, in our communities, black trans folk, gender-nonconforming folk, black queer folk, black women, black disabled folk – we have been leading movements for a long time, but we have been erased from the official narrative.
392
I love narrative videos, but sometimes I think they can limit a listener‘s experience of a song.
393
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
394
I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.
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I’m looking for a charismatic character – somebody who you just want to look at and listen to and whom the camera likes. I’m also looking for a narrative arc: Something is going to happen, and there will be a question that will make you wonder what happens at the end.
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The simple truth is that every veteran has his or her own unique story, and there’s no single narrative about the issue of veterans finding civilian employment. And no single solution.
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Writing for a film means the music has to serve the film, the narrative.
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The narrative shouldn’t stop for the song in a musical. The music has to continue the narrative of the storytelling.
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I say ‘spectacle’ rather than ‘story’ because in the end, it isn’t the intricacies of narrative that draw us to horror films. When it’s there, I’m grateful for the director’s skill at telling an exquisitely nuanced tale filled with psychological insight, but it is the spectacles that I take home with me.
406
The writing is only ever the attractive thing about a part. And also if all the elements within the writing come together – the character and the structure and the narrative – if they are all there then you become excited.
407
I think people forget how radical the narrative of ‘Slacker’ is. There’s no story, you know? We could go from one character to the next to the next and never return.
408
A lot of Broadway has that immigrant narrative of America as a place where you can become something else against all odds.
409
Sustaining a narrative in sentences and paragraphs is very different from songwriting. But the dedication to the craft and just the endurance that it takes, you know, to stick with it and believe you can pull it out and make it real and finish it, I learned that a long time ago writing songs.
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Fundamentally there is a narrative around where innovation can come out from.
412
Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art – underprocessed, underproduced – splinters and explodes.
413
I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.
414
I think that, every individual you invent in narrative work, you have to have some root in who that person is. That may be an aspect of yourself; it may be an aspect of something that you like, that you don’t like. It may be an aspect that you wish you had. Maybe something you admire in another person.
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As Christians we need to be patient, understanding, and kind. Instead of going on the attack, we can ask genuine questions. Instead of bristling when our narrative is summarily dismissed, we can carefully explain our way of seeing things. And when we are wrong, we won’t be afraid to say so.
416
As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative – the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.
417
If you are making a script based on a book it can be frustrating going back to the source novel, because you’re turning the story into a totally different thing; the narrative of film is different from that of a book.
418
Lots of people do stand up shows with no narrative, but I love a beginning, a middle and an end.
419
I think very few shows have come into our industry and changed the tempo and the narrative of stories, and ‘Once Upon a Time’ did that.
420
In both law and politics, I think the essential battle is the meta-battle of framing the narrative.
421
There’s this narrative that is entrenched in some of the professions that there’s this mysterious thing called ‘socioeconomic status’ that is immutably correlated with health. And it isn’t.
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I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.
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I hear music as narrative.
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I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.
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I don’t want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.
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And journaling became the place that I was able to find a sense of narrative control at a time when I had to cede so much control to others. It really – it became the place where I began to interrogate my predicament and to try to excavate some meaning from it.
431
‘Dhruva’ is not a first person narrative of Siddharth Abhimanyu.
432
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.
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If you can work a brand successfully into the narrative of your product, then it’s really cool. Then people actually take the brand up and say, ‘My positive experience in your product is directly connected and influenced by this brand and that worked great.’
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I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.
436
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.
437
I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can’t control it.
438
The real issue for the public is to figure out which narrative do we want. We can have a bigger government, if that’s the public’s choice. It’ll just require higher taxes on every American. Do you want that, or do you want smaller government, smaller taxes?
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It’s always important not to fall for the narrative of the terrorists. If you want to fight for getting a normal life back, you also have to participate.
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What sets ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ apart is Riggs’s use of ‘found’ photographs as a spark of inspiration for the narrative. ‘Found’ describes art created from common objects that are not normally considered art.
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If you do a sketch, that’s a very short narrative. Stand-up, it’s bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.
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Personal narrative is one of the few things where people don’t get caught up in fighting over esoteric rhetoric.
449
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.
450
‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘ and Paula are alternatives to what we, as plus-size women in America, have been told is our narrative, which is, you should be hating yourself or hating others for how you look.
451
Women often get ignored from main narrative, especially in films.
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As an actor I can bring the story, the narrative in each performance. If I can’t do that, then… might as well give up as an actor, hadn’t I?
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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.
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Ninety percent of the research comes first. I mostly blunder around reading stuff and talking to smart people until an idea batters or oozes its way through to my narrative brain.
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A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go.
461
In the ongoing effort to combat Ebola, more needs to be done to rewrite the public-health narrative. It must move from one that has been infused with fear to one that recognizes the hope for survival that supportive care can offer infected people.
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Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.
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The hard left labels anyone who challenges it ‘divisive.’ The leftists live in a world where everyone is free to look different but must think the same. I don’t play their game. I threaten them and their narrative. That’s why they slap the ‘divisive’ label and attempt to dismiss me. It’s not going to work – not on me.
465
In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
466
Brands‘ products should be the manifestation of a company‘s values. Those values should be the subject of all sorts of wonderful stories that comprise your company’s narrative.
467
Partnerships are good engines for narrative.
468
The genre of narrative business books that I love so much – the ones that have a you-are-there quality – was invented, or so it is said, in 1982 by David McClintick, who wrote ‘Indecent Exposure,’ a rollicking good read about a Hollywood scandal and the ultimate boardroom power struggle at Columbia Pictures.
469
I’m Godless. I’ve had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.
470
I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.
471
Let me be clear: I unequivocally support a two-state solution as the path to resolution of the Israel and Palestinian conflict, with Israel as the national homeland for the Jewish people. Moreover, I reject the demonization and de-legitimization of Israel represented by the BDS narrative and campaign.
472
Through the potent example of his own life, President Obama enabled us to believe the best about America, and, therefore, about ourselves. That uplifting narrative – essentially equating the promise of America with his extraordinary life story – swept candidate Obama into the presidency.
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I avoid continuously writing or tweeting about ISIS, as it centres them in the narrative and we end up reacting to them and reacting to the agenda they set.
475
For me, making a mass film is tougher. A lot of things needed to be intertwined into a two-hour narrative without getting too complicated.
476
You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there’s poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.
477
The narrative behind bitcoin has been dominated by bad behavior. The reality is bitcoin is filled with tons of talented developers building infrastructure.
478
Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book ‘Jane Eyre’ by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.
479
There’s a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It’s a narrative of hope.
480
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.
481
Difficulty is our most reliable narrative engine.
482
In my mind, there’s usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don’t want to enforce that on other people. I think that’s why I like using metaphor so much.
483
Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.
484
Day 1, when I was drafted to the Toronto Raptors, they had this stigma on them: Every guy leaves. Nobody wants to be here. Superstars, nobody wants to play in Canada. From Day 1, my whole mindset and approach to the game, being in Toronto, was I wanted to change that whole narrative to that whole organization.
485
Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.
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Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it’s necessary for the characters to change.
488
Things have character. So I’m interested in how the character of the thing might function as a protagonist in what isn’t a narrative.
489
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.
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There’s a logic to dreams that doesn’t necessarily follow linear narrative. You don’t know why things happen, it’s your subconscious pushing you, to give you information.
492
As I get older, I’m looking more and more for films that are actually about something rather than just narrative vehicles.
493
I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.
494
As the coding movement continues to grow, the common narrative of the white male geek as the predominant influencer on geek culture will erode.
495
Look, there’s no question that we have a challenge with gun violence. But there’s a lot more nuanced parts of that narrative, and that’s the part that I think that we have to make sure that we emphasize along with all the great things that are going on in Chicago, particularly in our neighborhoods.
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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.
499
If I’m doing a daily soap I would like my character to drive the narrative.
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There is a real danger of unintended consequences, of encouraging people to give up. Pessimism, if it becomes a habit, can reinforce a narrative of unstoppable decline. If there is nothing we can do, that releases us from our obligations.
502
Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too.
503
I am the daughter of Mr. Neo-realism: I should gravitate towards narrative simply told, character, the truth. And I do love those movies.
504
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.
505
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.
506
The old handbook on writing is ‘Write what you know.’ I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I’m not using fiction to extend the narrative.
507
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The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.
509
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
510
I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that… stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I’m much more cautious now.
511
It’s so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence.
512
Tapping into a more masculine, macho culture, I got in touch with my femininity, but differently. Macho culture is also pride of the body and showing it off – a relationship to theatricality, to construction. It’s about owning your narrative again.
513
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It’s no new narrative to say that when people get out of child stardom, they oftentimes rebel in very serious ways.
515
My dad’s a Pentecostal minister, meaning that he’s full of charisma. If he’s telling a story about Noah‘s ark, you best know each tiger is going to be having their own little conversation and narrative.
516
I saw my dad work hard and then would see and know his interest and intentions, and that wasn’t necessarily the narrative you would see in the press.
517
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.
518
The kinds of games I’m most interested in are narrative games.
519
‘Kiss Land’ is the story after ‘Trilogy‘; it’s pretty much the second chapter of my life. The narrative takes place after my first flight; it’s very foreign, very Asian-inspired. When people ask me, ‘Why Japan?’ I simply tell them it’s the furthest I’ve ever been from home. It really is a different planet.
520
You don’t enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.
521
This impeachment narrative started before President Trump was even nominated to the Repub – as the Republican candidate.
522
For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.
523
If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn’t really count as narrative.
524
One of the things that’s important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.
525
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It’s a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was ‘real’ religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that’s why it’s completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices.
528
We all have our own narrative of what human trafficking is supposed to be, but if you do a little research, human trafficking happens, in many different forms and shapes, right in our backyard.
529
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I just focus on my character and how pivotal it is to the narrative. I don’t mind even a 10-minute role, if it’s important to the script.
531
We don’t have a lot of narrative on TV or film, mainstream film, of brown queers. Latina queers, I can’t think of that many.
532
533
Music is a very physical experience, and I need to understand things physically to be able to create the narrative for them.
534
The narrative in 2020 must speak about gender equality which will only come from empowering the women who’ve been given the short end of the stick for far too long.
535
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In the future, I think movies are going to be more of data sets that viewers have a hand in controlling – where the narrative originates and what happens to the content.
537
I think what happens normally in a narrative film is that the camera constructs the reality.
538
It is quite surreal having a film made about your life. The whole process of turning real life into drama is interesting in itself, but even more so when it is your own life being put into the narrative forge.
539
My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.
540
There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That’s why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you’re not looking, you’ll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That’s narrative; that’s passing stuff down.
