Narrative Preference Quotes

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.

There is always this quarrel about what is preferable: the straight, naturalistic, epic storytelling or the modernistic, disjointed, slightly hermetic one. To me it does not matter, as long as it's good. I like both kinds. Although the common reader seems to prefer the first, which is to be expected, and who would blame her?

Muse, time has taught me that all metaphysical systems, even historical facts given as truths, are hardly that, so I amuse myself with more agreeable lies; I no longer read anything but novels.

Not all Peter Greenaway's stuff is sequential, narrative story. Some of it is like an art installation and I'm not particularly interested in being in an art installation to be honest. I'm interested in the story.

People aren't coming to me looking for political essays or polemic - they're looking for a rattling good story.

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

I'm not a one-liner guy. I'm a story guy.

Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.

I like small stories.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.

I'm endlessly intrigued by stories, and I love helping someone to formulate his or her story. I can drift off when I'm reading pure abstraction, but the narratives of human lives hold my attention every time.

Our society is just less open to platitudes, more open to stories.