Narrative Purpose Quotes

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

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.

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

Every song in 'Groundhog Day' works to forward the story in a chronological, narrative sense, to illuminate the state of mind of the person singing it and comment on the world.

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself.

If somebody is in a story, they need to be there for a reason, and not just to set up somebody else's story.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I wanted to make a redemptive thriller that didn't end with some kind of big, crazy shootout and blood spill, but more of a collision of ideas and a discussion of ethics.

I don't believe that narrative works when it's trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth.

What is the point of making the film if the man doesn't marry the girl?

God made (human beings) because he loves stories.

I do think of 'The Idiot,' in a way, as a self-standing book about a certain struggle to make meaning, the struggle for a girl to find meaning outside of the romance plot.

I think that, anybody with a strong will to tell a story, then that is fantastic. I think it's fantastic. I think sometimes people have what I'll call an ulterior motive with a story.

Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story.

In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience.

There is always a reason why, and I need to tell the stories.

As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot: pride, showmanship, the pursuit of power, self-aggrandizement, revenge, making money. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that, but I dislike closing a book with the sense that I've been had.

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.