Human Narrative Quotes

People always want narratives to be clean and easy.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.

The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have.

Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.

I'm always trying to look for how I can find human stories that aren't just dramas.

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

Russia is a place of great culture. If you've read Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov...the culture of the great Russian literature is amazing. The human narrative you get out of "War and Peace" is universal.

Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They're devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

I think there's a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we're drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.

I sometimes imagine a great writer as a sort of God-surrogate: the writer is doing his or her human-best to emulate what God might think of is, if God was inclined to observe some human beings and present their activities in the form of a narrative.