Narrative Sense Quotes

I've had enormous luck and enormous pleasure in working in such forms as movies and plays that I loved when I was a kid and I just - because I could always write dialogue, because I always had a sense of how people spoke. And because I had a strong narrative sense; growing up and loving stories, loving novels, I just seem to know how to tell a story and I read a lot, I went to a lot of movies, I went to a lot of plays, and it rubbed off on me. And that's all. It just rubbed off on me.

There is an old saying: In history nothing is true but the names and dates. In fiction everything is true but the names and dates. The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.

It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.

What else are our lives but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain ofliving?

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.

I loved the idea of dramatic art of storytelling as a way to make sense of things. It's really what I love and what I care about.

What I've experienced, I'm trying to put in a narrative form, I suppose, to say that it does make sense in this way.

These 150-minute superhero films that Hollywood is making are so concerned with their length that each scene doesn't have the time it needs to make sense.

I do have an innate understanding of where a story should or shouldn't go, in a way that I don't think can be taught.

If you track something like a political campaign and parcel out what's being communicated in a literal and narrative sense, and what's being communicated by means of emotional and symbolic language, you might find that it's the latter elements that absolutely dominate and move people. It makes me want to take that language and expose it.

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

I think I would choose to do things because they are interesting, because I like a character or because it's very well-written. Or because it makes sense.

Another part of the challenge was to bring back things that you've forgotten about and maybe some things you haven't forgotten about, recontextualize them and have the series make sense.