Narrative Quotations | Page 3

We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth, if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos - these are the promises art makes.

Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations - perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization.

This scene is done using a single sustained mastershot in order to allow the actors the most conducive environment for intimacy and intensity and in order to best communicate what happens in the film's pivotal scene. It cannot be cut without compromising the central scene of the narrative and thus rendering the mystery of the film incomprehensible. It remains more than a bit absurd to me that this scene would garner an R if shot exactly the same but from just the torso up but becomes an NC-17 because the mastershot reveals full bodies.

This scene is done using a single sustained master shot in order to allow the actors the most conducive environment for intimacy and intensity, and in order to best communicate what happens in the film's pivotal scene, ... It cannot be cut without compromising the central scene of the narrative and thus rendering the mystery of the film incomprehensible.

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.

The experience that a publication creates for its audience is the very essence of that publication's brand - and without deep engagement, that publication's brand will be weak. A good publication is a convener and an arbiter - it expresses a core narrative that becomes a badge of sorts for its readership.

The expected vertical line of Ikiru's narrative breaks when Kurosawa does a flash-forward in the middle of the film.

A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end.

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

We lay out our lives in a narrative we understand, like a movie, but are you enjoying making it or are you wondering who's watching my movie.

If you are making a script based on a book it can be frustrating going back to the source novel, because you're turning the story into a totally different thing; the narrative of film is different from that of a book.

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

I learned there's an amazing unexplored territory in terms of narrative. Before, I thought the unexplored territory was the form, the way you shoot a movie. Now, I'm learning about the beautiful marriage between form and narrative.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

Fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph.

To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.

We all love narratives where we're the captain of our boat, and Americans love them more than anybody else.

I very much admire Sheryl Sandberg for what she has done. I really do. But Sandberg's narrative also implies: "Well, it's your fault if you couldn't make it." There is a certain injustice in that.

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.

I don't consider myself to be a crusader of any sort. I was bystander to a certain number of newspaper crusades. They end badly, in terms of being either fraudulent or by inspiring legislations that makes things worse. So, I regard myself as someone coming to the campfire with the truest possible narrative he can acquire.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

My god is narrative filmmaking.

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.

Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content.

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

We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren't enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase - long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.

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.

We think those may be the narrative ones,

Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can't.

Yet one thing has not changed, ... A moviemaker's single indispensable asset -- as elementally essential now as it was in the Golden Years -- is the Story. And that means studio executives of this era must share the same DNA as industry pioneers in at least one particular -- the ability to find a narrative with heart and heat.

to build a common narrative of what happened in the war.

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

Without giving too much away, the storyline centers around a family that seeks to live out their dreams of becoming circus stars and the journey that takes them there. The story serves as the narrative thread that takes the audience through the show.

Film-makers keep the narrative screws fastened tight, which gives The Goblet of Fire an intensity that rarely flags,

While we can all access articles and information in so many places now - across blogs, in newspapers, on video - there is something very powerful about putting it all together into an edited format in a single issue that has a narrative stretching across the themes.

While we appreciate and are grateful for the government's comments and narrative of Mr. Fortier's labor in the past three years to assist the government in the investigation and prosecution of these cases, the retreat of support for Mr. Fortier as a trial witness and lukewarm endorsement in that regard is factually inaccurate,

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself.

You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don't agree with that narrative.

Through the potent example of his own life, President Obama enabled us to believe the best about America, and, therefore, about ourselves. That uplifting narrative - essentially equating the promise of America with his extraordinary life story - swept candidate Obama into the presidency.

We inherited a site with a large, bunker-like structure and made every attempt to weave it into the narrative of the project. The lower portion of the building, with its militaristic past, represents the first portion of Rabin's life as a warrior. The upper portion of the building, with its mission of education, its expansive views, and symbolic dove's wings, represents the diplomat and mediator that he became.

We imprint and project on songs what we want so that they become more important to us. We imprint intimacy in the songs, give them a narrative separate from and parallel to what the author's intent was. In that way, we make the songs symbolic of our own relationships.

'Breaking Bad' and 'The Shield' were planned right from the start so that their narrative trajectory would come down in a blaze of fireworks.

Every good story needs a hero. Back when I wrote 'The Search,' that hero was Google - the book wasn't about Google alone, but Google's narrative worked to drive the entire story.

At one point in the 'Onyx Court' series, I think during 'In Ashes Lie', I suggested that Lune might come to love someone else eventually. Which was me pushing back against the narrative trope that people only get one True Love in their entire lives - an idea I think is kind of pernicious - but in retrospect, I wish I hadn't done it there.

At that point I had a real 30-year narrative to sink my teeth into.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.

During his brilliant campaign, President Obama wove a powerful narrative about the American we all hope for. And that hope was grounded in a very powerful reality: President Obama's own inspiring life story.

'Fast Food Nation' isn't about my journey into the dark world of fast food and the prison book is not about my journey into the prison world. I'm not using myself as any kind of narrative link.

Fashion is this obsessive narrative that people don't understand but they can't stop looking at.

Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the 'Washington Post.'

I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.

I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.

Perhaps one of the things I'll get criticized for, ... is the choice not to use the internal monologue that Herbert used in the book. If you use the voice-over narrative -- if you use it to tell the emotional state of a character while you're watching that character -- it has the effect of stopping the motion picture. Movies are images and moving pictures. Novels are words.

The narrator is not anybody in particular. It's a group of women, so there's no particular identity to the narrative voice. A Faulkner story, 'A Rose For Emily.' I admired used that voice and I wanted to try it out.. It was an experiment for myself.

The narrative was originally from four points of view, including a mother, father and baby, and the language was very, well, French. Very poetic.

The narrative that Peter Jackson has put into 'The Battle of the Five Armies,' it stands alone as a film. Rather than just finishing off the story, it's like a whole new adventure all of its own. I'm very excited about it.

The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

And the narrative for the Taliban that they can wait us out is a flawed narrative. I think that the unambiguous international support for Afghanistan has been a very powerful message. You know, that was the message that came out of the NATO summit. We will not abandon Afghanistan.

As artists, we are so not in control most of the time of the content or the narrative of our characters, and sometimes writing takes a turn and it's not something we necessarily have control over. It's just a lot of random dumb luck, so when things click, you've just got to enjoy it.

As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

Art is a narrative and tells a lot of personal stories. If we don't try to save the history of our culture, of our communities, we lose that forever.

Austen is a really beautiful writer when it comes to narrative and dialogue. Her writing is beautiful and elegant. As a novelist, she's one of the best.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.

They're narrative films, but there's also something very experimental in the way that the narrative works. You sometimes watch one of these films and in the end you're like, what just happened? That was really funny, but I have no idea what just happened in the plot. I like that.

At least in America, the narrative is I'm a Cannes favorite. But, in fact, I've had my best experience in Venice, both with the audience and the jury.

A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.

Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.

It's a simple narrative on the surface, ... The setting, certainly. And there are certain things that remind one of genre imagery that you've seen before, whether it's action movies or crime movies or Westerns. There are a lot of elements that look familiar. But it's kind of like the family itself. Everything that looks normal, in the end, isn't really. And like a lot of David's movies, at the end you say, 'Well, is anyone really normal?'

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 little more than books on film.

I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters.

It was in a lot of ways a very experimental project, because the narrative is nonlinear and in some cases, contradictory. We wanted it to feel elusive, unsettled. I thought Courteney would be really good in the part, but I also knew it was sort of hard to explain. I didn't know what she would think,

It's not the Army's intent to restrict the use of blogs for general use in disseminating information. However, it is the Army's intent to make soldiers and their chain of command aware that OPSEC measures must be adhered to when using blogs. Our adversaries are capable of collecting sensitive or classified information, both in narrative or image form, that gets posted on blogs when OPSEC policies are violated.

It sort of started with this idea of doing a teen noir show. The first-person, hard-boiled narrative is inherent in noir. I wanted her to sound like a 17-year-old female Raymond Chandler.

Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.

The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.

Eventually, though, ... Sony urged me to use English instead of French, so I wrote an English version of Etienne and Nadine's work, and then I felt compelled to expand on their original text. Their work was really a series of gorgeous tableaux, and I added more personal narrative and history for some of the characters.

The body of work I create combines traditional storylines and postmodern narrative strategies to approach themes such as belonging, identity politics and conflict, as well as the push towards - and resistance against - modernization.

That is one strategy to help prepare the students. A teacher might also tackle a specific section of the narrative and teach that as a lesson, such as the who and what, or the when and where.

It's certainly a cliche to remark that a nonfiction book 'reads just like a novel,' but in the case of Jonathan Eig's 'The Birth of the Pill,' I have no other recourse, since his narrative is full of larger-than-life characters sharply limned and embarked on fascinating doings, their story told in sprightly visual fashion.

It's great that I can look up a fact instantly on my cellphone, but I miss the days in my room with a dog-eared, text-heavy paperback, immersed in the statistics of crime and punishment and lunacy, completely alone with the narrative of human depravity.

It's very easy, if you come from a place like Pakistan, to imagine that there's a narrative of American aggression towards the place that you come from. But that, in itself, is just a political view.

The new narrative for Europe should be about the need to have a responsible organisation, the need to be able to defend our interests and promote our values, like human rights.

Small paintings can be fantastic. But you can't often get a narrative out of a small painting. In any case, museums are huge places, and you want to take up some space.

At the same time, I realized a very strong contemporary narrative was needed. Without that, the movie would end with the shower sequence in Psycho.

I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

I'm interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion.

I'm looking for a charismatic character - somebody who you just want to look at and listen to and whom the camera likes. I'm also looking for a narrative arc: Something is going to happen, and there will be a question that will make you wonder what happens at the end.

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

In a media-saturated world, it is essential that we all turn a critical eye and ear to what we're offered by the mass media as well as the independent media. (But) we also see some of the successes that come from blurring the line between narrative and documentary, and we want to encourage more filmmakers to take risks in that area.

If you can build a narrative around a series of seemingly related events, it becomes more compelling, and this narrative fits together very well for Democrats.

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.

In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.