Narrative Relevance Quotes

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

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

It can be a fictional character and yet relatable... It always depends on the content of the film and what you are doing.

After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.

If the story's there for it, if there's a reason for it, then I'm all for it. But if you throw in a barbed wire match just to do a barbed wire match, then it makes no sense to me.

A lot of fiction doesn't answer a question that any reasonable person would ever ask.

Sometimes I realize halfway through a story, I'm like, 'Why would anyone care about this? It's uninteresting.'

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.

If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).

Sometimes stories are inherently important whether or not they have a direct relation to your life.

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody's interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

You can't feel sorry for a scene. If the movie works without the scene, then you don't need the scene.