Narrative Styles Quotes

There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

Books are a really fun way to get yourself in a certain mindset or mood as an actress. Also, the way people tell a story is so revealing and I think it's important as an actress to see all the different ways people can unravel a story, and introduce the characters and the way people speak.

You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.

I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.

Each generation wants their own form of entertainment and their own form of storytelling.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can't quite see. Either way, it's the same story.

There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story.

I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don't know what I would write.

Consider the different narrative styles within the story, and the glee with which the "moralistic narrator" celebrates Aschenbach's fall - maybe, then, this is a hostile verdict and the international fame is warranted after all (given that Mann modeled his protagonist so closely on himself, it would be quite odd if he had intended Aschenbach's literary inferiority to be a fixed part of the interpretation).

Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling.

Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.

Different directors have different techniques in the use of films. Cronenberg is very different in the way he works with film, and how he takes the audience into his films is different than how Peter Jackson would do that or Jon Stewart. So, if you go between those artists, you shift gears and you kind of fall into the working method of that film.

The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.

I've been very fortunate in my career to work across a lot of different mediums. I've hosted, I've narrated, I've acted in television, miniseries, film - all of which are very, very different in the way they tell stories.

I write across genres so I see them, more often, as complementary instead of separated by boundaries.