Meaningful Narrative Quotes

There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.

I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.

There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end being a utopia of happiness that we'll reach through socialism or free trade or democracy, and then it will all be wonderful.

If you organize your life around your passion, you can turn your passion into your story and then turn your story into something bigger - something that matters.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

My goal always is to tell a universal story, meaning it's about a person who has an idea, a vision, a dream, an ambition to make the world somewhat less chaotic.

I try to find stories that I would think that everyone would find interesting, and just a good entertaining story, and then if I can find a story that has a raison d'etre behind it that I feel is important then that's the best for me.

I felt that there was a beautiful story [ in "All We Had"] to be told and one that was valuable and also one that was a size that I could do as my first.

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.

I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

As an actor, that's the most that you can hope for - not only being part of a story, but being part of a story that matters.

'Night They Missed the Horror Show' is my signature story. It changed my life, so it remains my favorite.

Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative.

There's two tiers of science fiction: the McDonalds sci-fi like Star Trek, where they have an adventure and solve it before the last commercial, and there are books that once you've read, you never look at the world the same way again.

If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?

Many a trivial novel has been written about an important subject, and many a profound one about nothing in particular.

I am first and foremost a storyteller; I want to tell a good story, and I want it to mean something - something that I think is important.

Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.

I don't want to be a commentator of my own work. If you've written the story, you've said what you want to say.