Traditional Narrative Quotes

I do see myself as an old-fashioned storyteller. But there's always a touch of the political in my plays.

The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers, and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.

There is a narrative to every life, and I believe in the classic mode of storytelling that goes back to Homer and carries through to today.

I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.

I want to link together ancient forms of storytelling and the future.

I'm not really interested in doing a traditional romantic comedy where everything ties up neatly.

Before people outside of the Western European tradition started asking to be in there, the people who were accumulating objects for the museum were perfectly satisfied with the narrative they were constructing.

'The Art Student's War' is, at its core, a traditional American wartime love story. As such, it is timely and engrossing. By the end, all its principal characters 'have been to Hell and back.'

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

I'm a fan of books that are almost languorous in their storytelling. That is a little bit lost sometimes in the modern media that we have.

With 'All Is Song,' I tried to construct a very traditional narrative that pulls no tricks.

The films that I love are very straightforward stories, like really old-fashioned stuff.

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

It's no accident that Cinderella has been in the culture for thousands of years, and in cross cultures. I've traveled a bit recently, and in Russia, they completely believe they own this tale. And in Italy, they feel it absolutely is part of who they are. There is a timeless web to it.

The standard reason for Thanksgiving doesn't mean nothing to me.

Of an old tale which every schoolboy knows.

I obviously read and adore traditional fiction. I teach traditional fiction, I also teach all kind of not-so-traditional fiction. And since I'm such a plot buff, and I'm really such a narrative buff, I can't seem to relinquish my - not just reliance - but excitement about those traditional techniques.

Nothing in recent years, on television or anywhere else, has improved on a good story that begins "Once upon a time..."