Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.
The magic of life is its imprecision, the multiple narratives constantly unfolding before us. Every step we take, every decision we make, reshuffles the deck of our lives and sets a new trajectory of possibility in motion.
When I was growing up, there was still that narrative of 'you finish school, you go and get married, you become somebody's wife and you get kids and tend to them.' I think it is really important to reach for something.
Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.
I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.
New platforms are emerging: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Xbox. And film actors are gravitating towards television, because there are basically better roles there. Television is making the kind of epics and genres that the movie studios used to make, and...
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
The real issue for the public is to figure out which narrative do we want. We can have a bigger government, if that's the public's choice. It'll just require higher taxes on every American. Do you want that, or do you want smaller government, smaller...
Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the en...
Once I got into college, I discovered literature - in particular, multicultural literature. I just started to understand the power of story and narrative, and you know, like anyone else, I kind of wanted to do it, too.
Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking ...
I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze t...
It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with litt...
It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
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.
'Game of Thrones' is the broadest of narratives. I don't know if anyone in the U.S. has done a story on such a large scale before, both in terms of what George R.R. Martin wrote and what's on the show.
It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.
Being bound to one particular storyline such that one’s narrative is rigid, does not imply the need to avoid formulating particular other kinds of possibilities. Rather, it involves being stuck in one self-limiting, self-reinforcing set of possibil...
Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.
We do not enjoy a story fully at first reading. Not till curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savor the real beauties.
The folktale world is oriented positively toward its protagonist; a folktale is defined by the hero's triumph: magic weapons and helpers are, with the necessary narrative retardation, at his beck and call.
