Non-Linear Storytelling Quotes

The 'Station to Station' film is a fast-moving journey through the modern creative landscape. It's a kaleidoscope of voices and impressions rather than a standard linear film.

I think you have to serve a lot of masters when you're doing a video game: you're not just telling a linear story or doing something that's all action.

From my very first movie, what was my concentration, my inspiration, was I didn't want to narrate something, I didn't want to tell a story. I wanted to show something, I wanted for them to make their own story from what they were seeing.

Normally, if I would read in a script that there's mostly flashbacks and mostly voiceover, I would run as far away as possible.

James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

'Guild Wars 2' is a wider world in that we have a lot of different mechanics available for storytelling. We have our personal story, the story of you, which is tailored for your character. You answer some basic questions; you make some decisions early on, and that follows through.

One of the interesting things about 'Saw' is that you don't find out about things in sequential or linear order. One of the things that fans have liked a lot is, we don't forget about details. They come back and reveal themselves as the story evolves.

In the future, I think movies are going to be more of data sets that viewers have a hand in controlling - where the narrative originates and what happens to the content.

The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

I think the industry tends to like to think in the narrow sort of mindset of a businessman, and businessman absolutes, and movies really exist in a much grayer region of dreams and stuff like that, and instinct is prized in movies, it's not prized with the businessmen in movies, but movies themselves often reward instinct rather than pie charts.

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.

'Indigo Prophecy' already brought a lot of new features to the traditional adventure genre, including the Action system, MultiView, Bending Stories, etc. 'Heavy Rain' will include features like advanced physics and AI, realistic characters and living environments.

I wouldn't say I'm a fan of Tarantino, per se, but I like several of his movies very much, probably 'Reservoir Dogs' the most of them.

Surreal fiction is a sophisticated art form. Events happen divorced from conventional logic, as events in a dream may happen. But unlike dreams, everything in the story contributes to an overall coherent point, impression or emotion.

We have a whole industry which is gigantic: games. Games is very successful. It's its own art form, though, and it's not the same as a linear narrative.

We began to do little things, have little scenes where we just talked about things that had nothing to do with the plot. In fact, in the beginning, they didn't want us to do that. But as time went on, you see that in so many shows. I think we were the first to do that.

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.

I don't know what "Altmanesque" means, though I suppose I'm flattered by it.

I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.

I find that albums generally tell a story. Because it's music, it doesn't have to be in chronological order.

'Fire Walk With Me' was so divisive because the tone was so different than the TV series. But now television is almost more of a free medium than cinema.

All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script, and it's very linear. There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script, and then you cut that, and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.

I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

Korean cinema is very improvisational, and there is a unique power that stems from this.

I first read 'The Lord of the Rings' as an adolescent. It's a dense novel, a sprawling, complex monster of a book populated with a prolific number of characters caught up in a narrative structure that, frankly, does not lend itself to conventional storytelling.