Narrative Uncertainty Quotes

When I start a story, I don't know where it's going.

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

I think once you do the unexpected, and you take the viewers to a position of discomfort about being able to rely on characters surviving, then it does completely affect the way in which the drama is viewed.

Here [in Wonder Boys] I had this group of characters where you didn't know which were the important ones or what direction they were heading.

I first read 'Lolita' when I was 16, which I think is a little bit young. But it was a thrilling and disturbing read because it was the first time I really sensed that you could have an unreliable narrator, that you didn't have to sort of tell the truth in a narrative, that there could be something deeper and richer and more complicated going on.

I can't see much purpose in archaeology unless you can find out the narrative about that place, or even realise that nobody actually knows what the narrative was.

I did turn down 'The Virgin Suicides.' I talked to the producers about it, and I just honestly told them that I didn't get it. Is it supposed to be funny, is it a thriller, what is it?

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

The problem in cinema is that you can never predict what will happen.

I try to know as much as I can about a book before the beginning, but I never know exactly where it's going to end.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

There's always a certain concern whenever you go and shoot a field piece: that maybe all the elements won't come together, knowing that you have limited time to tell a story, hoping that you get all the elements you need, hoping the subjects are comfortable.

'The Walking Dead' never wants you to get too comfortable with characters and cast members. I think about the time you feel fairly secure with your appreciation of a character is about the time the show will gut-punch you.

When my characters are questioning things, it's not me leading up to an answer; it's me asking those same questions and letting the characters' lives unfold and seeing where it takes them.

The great thing about 'Allen Gregory' is that we try to make it really questionable that the things he says have happened, have really happened. We like that ambiguity.

Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history.

What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don't really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don't you?

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.

I was nervous when I first started True Blood because if you do a play or a movie, you know the complete arc of the character. You can see the end. But with a show like True Blood, you don't know what's going to happen.

Never trust a narrator whose opening gambit is to insist he's not mad.

I just have to trust that the story is going to shake out in such a way that's going to be palatable to readers.