Narrative Function Quotes

I don't believe that narrative works when it's trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth.

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.

Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

Classical music fulfills for me the function of narrative. I spend 90 minutes a day listening to symphonic music - Beethoven to Bartók - some chamber pieces, and that's my enrichment.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.

I'm not at all sure dialogue is meant to advance the story; I know that sometimes it is the story.