Narrative Authority Quotes

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

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.

When I do 'Sweet Tooth,' really, whatever I want to do with the characters kind of goes. I'm sort of in charge.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

I wrote a draft of 'Playboy' for Warner Brothers, and it was impossible to really be independent of Hugh Hefner. In the end, Hugh Hefner was unable to take the back seat required to be able to write something about him that I felt I could do.

Power, for the writer, lies in his ability to reveal …

… fiction may be admitted to vouch for the genius of nations, while history has nothing to offer that is entitled to credit

Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

I think, as a filmmaker, you're always responsible for your film.

Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.

A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.

To share a story is in part to take ownership of it, especially because you are often able to comment on a story that you are sharing on social media.

If it is properly done, the 'as told to' autobiography represents how the subject wants his story told.

If your story is being told by someone who doesn't really know it, it's not going to come out accurate. A lot of it has to do with context. Whoever's behind the camera or pen or whatever.

I think the biggest thing is voice. Whose voice is it? Who gets to control the narrative?

In that sense, film is superior, but the difficulty is your lack of control as a writer.

Even criticism is more interesting when the writer's authority does not only come through this omniscient narrator, but through questions, ambivalence, vulnerability. A mind questioning and on the move, not just settling down and declaring - that's one of the most interesting possibilities.

I didn't like filtering the story through me, saying, 'Reader, you'll be safe with me. While it gets a little dangerous, it'll be okay because, after all, you're with me, because I'm a warm convivial voice. But let's be entertained by this horrible stuff.' I didn't like that.

Who has ownership over stories these days?

If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.

On the one hand I wonder, Was this really my story to tell? On the other hand, I just wanted the story to be told. But the truth is that I didn't think anybody was going to read it.

I try to do the story the way I feel the story should be done, and how that folds into whatever larger sorts of categories or questions is really none of my business.

The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.