Narrative Theory Quotes

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.

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.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.

You can't be real," Delilah murmurs. "Says who?" I ask. "Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?

Film theory has nothing to do with film.

... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

I wrote my novel 'Bitter Greens' as the creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts and am now looking at the history of the Rapunzel tale as my theoretical component.

I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.

I went to Princeton to major in comparative literature. I never went to film school, but I studied storytelling across mediums - poems, literature, film, and journalism.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

Post-modernism was the worst thing that could have happened to our democracy. The idea that you have to deconstruct and destroy all grand narratives is not a good one.

When I'm not writing, I do a lot of research reading on the shape of civilization. Fiction can be a lot of different things... but I feel like it's my job to write about the way things are.

The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.

I discovered John Truby ten years ago when a friend told me about his screenwriting course. I studied Truby's principles for a year and -- using them -- I wrote the first draft of The Thieves of Ostia in two weeks. I go back to his teachings before each new book I write. Each time I study Truby, I learn something new.

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.

There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I'm a professional student of music.

We're all the stories we tell ourselves.

I saw Roland Barthes's 'Mourning Diary' at a bookshop, and I felt it was like I was destined to see the book. I read it all in one go while I was in the shop. The book was mind-blowing.

Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'