Narrative Reflection Quotes

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

Your character that you create in your writing not only represents who you are, but also represents a number of people who you've met along the way.

It's very interesting how life imitates art, and art imitates life; I find, whenever I read scenes of some magnitude, I'm like, 'Oh, I feel like I've experienced this,' or 'I am experiencing this,' or 'I might start to experience it soon.'

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

It's not at all a far jump to think that overall perceptions of gender - and what is and is not important in gender roles - would carry over from life to fiction.

Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

Allow me now to return to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half painful self-deceit, to call them).

The perfect equation is form equals content. The style of the film reflects the story, and that's what you're always aiming for. You're not always necessarily successful at it, but that's the ambition that you're trying to do.

I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.