Narrative Difference Quotes

It's interesting because when David Fincher was making "Fight Club," he said, "It's a romance." And it really is. Almost everything I ever write is just a romance. And that needed to be sort of pointed up at the end of "Fight Club." The film has a very different ending than the book does.

Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from another.

People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn't really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look at it, but they are different things.

Each of my books is different from the last, each with its own characters, its own setting, its own themes. As a writer, I need the variety. I sense my readers do, too.

If you are making a script based on a book it can be frustrating going back to the source novel, because you're turning the story into a totally different thing; the narrative of film is different from that of a book.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

Films are always different from books.

In the theatre, words are eighty to eighty-five percent of the importance of what is happening to you for your comprehension. In film, words are about twenty percent. It's a different figure, but it's almost an opposite ratio. For the words are only a little bit of embroidery, a little bit of lacework.