Narrative Closure Quotes

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end

If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.

I find it ironic that happy endings now are called fairytale endings because there's nothing happy about most fairytale endings.

Ultimately, bridging the practice of forensic science and the public's need for story may be difficult. We crave narrative, order from chaos, a mystery solved, good guys winning out over the bad ones. But science, and forensic science, should be more neutral and, thus, more nuanced.

What's amazing about doing movies, compared to television, there's an ending you can see. There's an enthusiasm to it.

The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.

The most propagandistic element of 'Frozen' was the transformation of the prince at the beginning of the story, who was a perfectly good guy, into a villain with no character development whatsoever about three-quarters of the way to the ending.

On TV, stories and events are finalized in 30 or 60 minutes, or neatly tied up after a season or two. The best stories are the ones that force us to come to our own conclusions and to explain why we believe in our conclusions.

I always designed 'Gravity Falls' to be a finite series about one epic summer-a series with a beginning, middle, and end.

A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end.

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.

The real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

It happened to me on 'King of the Hill,' where I'd left it before the end and didn't really participate in the ending, and I always felt a little bit like I wanted to try a different version of that story.

Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.

I think the best endings bring you back in rather than close things off with absolute finality. I'm not saying they necessarily have to be ambiguous, but we don't always need to know what happens when everyone wakes up tomorrow morning.

As we began working toward the finale of 'Lost,' I knew there was no possible ending that was going to be universally loved, and I accepted that. We ended the story the way we wanted it to end, and we stand by it. On my Twitter feed, I still get ten to fifteen positive comments for every negative one.

This idea that you can watch a show like 'True Detective,' and it was awesome, but is it really ruined for you if the finale is not your favorite episode of it? It's just odd to me.

I can't say that the ending of a story is always the best part of the story, and yet there's sort of this implicit idea that the finale is somehow supposed to be the mind-blowing best episode of a show. The question is: Why is that? Why do people make that assumption?

If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

With the finale episode of 'Gravity Falls' our job as storytellers is to finish all the things we've started.

Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.

When people don't like the way a play ends, they're likely to blame the play.

I still like the relationship part of any story. You don't want your character to figure everything out and then at the end of the day, go home and eat soup from a can by herself.

I must say, I always - from experience, when I watch TV shows and I see characters leave without a proper explanation or leave with not enough time, I get irritated. I like it when there's a clean-cut reason or a defining moment where they have to go. Whether that's death or not, I think that's subjective.

I get tired of stories that keep going and going and never get anywhere. It's like a promise that's never fulfilled. Stories need endings. Otherwise, they aren't really stories. Just pages.