Narrative Meaning Quotes

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

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.

Maybe our telling of the story wasn't as clear as it should have been, but I don't think that's true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.

The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

By nature, human beings search for ways to make sense and meaning out of their lives and their world. One way that we make meaning is through the telling of our stories. Stories connect us, teach us, and warn us never to forget.

I always find it fun to read a script and then find the messages in the script because I believe every story has them.

The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

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

A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.

Sometimes stories are inherently important whether or not they have a direct relation to your life.

For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

Movies, as I grew up loving them, were always about something.

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.

I think there's a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we're drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.