Narrative Start Quotes

Every ongoing character has to start somewhere.

If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

I'm at the beginning of it. I'm Elektra's last job before the story kicks off.

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.

There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane began with a friend giving me a rabbit doll - forgive me, Edward, for using that word; he doesn't like "doll" - for Christmas. I said, "Oh, he's lovely, what's his name?" And she said, "Edward." And a few days after I received the rabbit, who was dressed very handsomely in Edwardian kind of clothes, I saw him stripped of his finery and face down on the bottom of the ocean floor. Why? I don't know. But that's where his story began in my head.

In 1974, I first met Carl. I was 25 years old. I am 51 now.

I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.

I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.

The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.

When you open a book it's like going to the theater first you see the curtain then it is pulled aside and the show begins.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

Marley was dead: to begin with.

The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time.

'The Sisters Brothers' started out as a little bit of dialogue between these two men who became Eli and Charlie Sisters.

It begins with the kind of story the writers want to tell. We never sit around in those retreats and say, 'We really need to make a change. Let's change this character.' Or throw a dart at the wall and see what hits. It all begins with story.

The shouting and opinion and jokes don't exist if there isn't first a story.

A beginning idea for a book might be: a boy emerges from a hole in the ground. He enters a house. The book will take place in the first ten minutes following his arrival.

Where does a story truly begin? In life, there are seldom clear-cut beginnings, those moments when we can, in looking back, say that everything started. Yet there are moments when fate intersects with our daily lives, setting in motion a sequence of events whose outcome we could never have foreseen.