Narrative Fiction Quotes

Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist's office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching banal and vulgar films spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us. ~ John Cheever

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction. ~ Paul Auster

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand. ~ Jess Row

The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction - there are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome. ~ Marco Tempest

In a whodunnit, when a detective hears that Sir Somebody Smith has been stabbed thirty-six times on a train or decapitated, they accept it as a quite natural occurrence. They pack their bags and head off to ask questions, collect clues, ultimately to make an arrest. But I wasn't a detective. I was an editor - and, until a week ago, not a single one of my acquaintances had managed to die in an unusual and violent manner. Apart from my own parents and Alan, I hardly knew anyone who had died at all. It's strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery and what is it that attracts us - the crime or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable? I made a mental note to check out Alan's sales figures in San Pedro Sula in Honduras (the murder capital of the world). It might be that they didn't read him at all. ~ Anthony Horowitz

Memory is the foundation of identity. Through our sense of identity, we act. We determine our moral judgements. We rewrite our own memories, of course, all the time. We create fresh narratives to use in our survival. We agree on fresh histories enabling us to take action. It is part of what makes us such flawed creatures. Creatures of such narrative fiction creating cause and effect. ~ Michael Moorcock

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end. ~ Anthony Horowitz

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong. ~ Terry Zwigoff

Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing. We try to see ourselves in them. The same I.D.-relation, however, also means that we try to see them in ourselves. When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it's less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences. ~ David Foster Wallace

All I want is to sleep
to dream. Life is better in dreams. ~ Christina Westover

He hoped they were wrong, but he had a bad feeling, that nagging one that always told him he was right. He didn't like knowing, but that radar had saved not only him, but his fellow GhostWalkers on more than one occasion. ~ Christine Feehan

Everyone lives by selling something. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Day 72
I remember oranges and you don't mind me leaving the queue momentarily to find some. When you say, Of course, you reach for my arm in sympathy and recognition. This may be the thing that breaks me today, that stops me in my tracks before driving me forward, turning a corner, making something work, letting everything happen. When I return, you're touching my yoghurts, reading the ingredients, as though you are making them yours, protecting them in my absence and amusing yourself with the cherry-ness of them. On days like this, I want to take my strangers home with me. ~ Gemma Seltzer

One of the primary differences for me between fiction and poetry is that fiction uses every sort of tool that poetry does but hides it much, much more. Fiction doesn't necessarily reveal what it's doing with rhythm and sound and patterning. ~ Brian Evenson

Almost all heroism is designed to make you inert by placing it in a context that you can't possibly act on. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Life rushes when we're weak and drags when we're ready, always at odds with what we need and when. ~ Halo Scot

Real life is crazier than fiction. ~ Lauren Bowles

That's why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think. ~ Walter Salles

Durand smiles. There is nothing behind the smile except perhaps another smile, repeating ad infinitum into the distance.
'Of course,' he says. ~ Beatrice Hitchman

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science. ~ Terry Pratchett

A friendship like theirs was hard to come by, and when such a thing is found, it is often even harder to hold on to.
But, as so few come to learn, absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder. ~ Ross Turner

The name has always occupied a space between the concrete and the abstract, the individual and the social, but when it begins to be shaped and charged with meaning in places removed from the physical world, in that way entertaining the world of fiction, albeit unseen by the majority, at the same time as this fictional world is expanding and taking up an ever greater part of our lives - the TV screens are now not only in our own rooms, but also on the walls of our trains and under the luggage bins of our planes, in the waiting rooms of our doctors' offices and the halls of our banks, even in the supermarkets, quite apart from our carrying them around in the form of laptop computers and cell phones, in such a way that we inhabit two realities, one abstract and image-based, in which all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are, and one concrete, physical, which is the one we move around in and are more palpably a part of - when we arrive at a point where everything is either fiction or seen as fiction, the job of the novelist can no longer be to write more fiction. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

There was always so much going on. Never any time to stop and smell the roses. Never any roses to stop and smell anyway. ~ Ellie Lieberman

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me. ~ Tom Wolfe

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.' ~ Jane Lindskold

I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times. ~ Bill Styron

The night I left home I felt that I had been tricked or trapped into going - and not even by Mrs Winterson, but by the dark narrative of our life together.
Her fatalism was so powerful. She was her own black hole that pulled in all the light. She was made of dark matter and her force was invisible unseen except in its effects.
What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us? ~ Jeanette Winterson

Is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one? ~ Rick Bass

... there are certain questions that must never be asked. Of anyone. Even oneself. ~ Jenny Lynne

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. ~ Richard Dawkins

Teach them the shame that tells the lie, "I am unforgivable," when the truth is, "I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control." Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage. ~ Geoffrey Wood

He hugs me and I'm home.
He kisses me and I'm never alone. ~ David Estes

It's sad to see the devil cry. ~ Aubrey Brooks

I read anything I could get my hands on: science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers. I even became hooked on the Bantam reprints of the old pulp novels from thirties and forties: Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Avenger. ~ James Rollins

For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. ~ George Orwell

Luis found all this very exciting. He had enthusiasm for myths, legends, bad omens, bad weather, supernatural happenings and inexplicable events. His passion for superstitions and doomsaying drove his other family members crazy. He didn't often meet curious strangers with whom he could share his fantastic tales. ~ Zita Steele

My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.) ~ C.S. Lewis

As a fiction writer, let me make it up, and let me make it up to you. I'll pen our love story, if you'll be my co-author. ~ Jarod Kintz

Emma was doing something nice for Simon? Hell must be enjoying the snow day. ~ E.J. Stevens