Literary Narrative Quotes

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

'21 Grams' is only one story told by three different points of view, but they are really physically connected - literally, with the heart.

Philip Glass, like [Virginia] Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is in that which begins, climaxes, and ends... Glass and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether literary or musical, in favor of something more meditative, less neatly delineated, and more true to life. For me, Glass [finds] in three repeated notes something of [a] rapture of sameness.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'

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.

Movie narration in the forties was radically different than the narrative involved in books.