Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.
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.
Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time.
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 taxes?
I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.
Believe it or not, one of the things I try to do around here is try to look for opportunities to work with people across the aisle. I know that's not the common narrative. But the truth is if you want to get anything done, that's an absolute requirement.
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.'
I have loved football as an almost mythic game since I was in the fourth grade. To me, the game wasn't even grounded in reality. The uniform turned you into a warrior. Being on a team, the mythology of physical combat, the struggle against the elements, the narrative of the game.
Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.
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.
That inner narrative - the desire to understand the way I am - never really switches off.
I look at scripts, and sometimes I apply theory to them. For 'Antiviral,' for example, I was reading Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' and it was all about the psychological process by which we fetishize the female image. It's all about scopophilia.
As conservatives, we know the media is stacked against us. We know popular culture is often stacked against us. We know the narrative has been written without our voice despite our best efforts.
It's always important not to fall for the narrative of the terrorists. If you want to fight for getting a normal life back, you also have to participate.
The journey and excursions in Mexico which have originated the narrative and remarks contained in this volume were made in the months of March, April, May, and June of 1856, for the most part on horseback.
Biggie and Big Pun were the best storytellers of the '90s. I would get wrapped up in the narrative of what they were talking about.
When you look at someone good like J.J. Abrams who gives you the spectacle and great action set pieces but also gives you character and great story and plotting and narrative, I think it's my job - and my intention - to do both.
The problem with a lot of narrative films is that they're not real enough.
Online theft has changed the business model of filmmaking because the DVD market is very soft. So, more ambitious, compelling, character-driven narrative of a certain budget level isn't really a viable business model in the eyes of the studios right now.
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.
Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.'
At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention.
In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren't absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.
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 entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.
I wanted to fold into the 'Hellraiser' narrative something about the guy - the Frenchman Lemarchand - who made the mysterious box, which raises Pinhead. I figured, 'Well, what would have happened to him?' He might well have been taken to Devil's Island, and I thought that would be a pretty cool place to start the movie.
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.
I watch a lot of television, for better or worse, and I am particularly interested in what Michael Moore brought up in 'Bowling for Columbine,' which is the idea that they're selling a narrative of fear.
For queer people, the personal is very political, just to talk about it in a public space. It's very political just to come out and take up that space and be like, 'This is my narrative. It's not an outsider narrative, and it's not a fetish narrative; it's just my story, and it's worth being told and listened to.'
I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.
My mom used to tell me stories at night, read books to me - and I read 'em over and over and over again. And you know what I learned from that? I went back and looked at everything - Why do I like reading the same stories over and over and over again? What, was I some kind of nincompoop? No - the narrative gave me connection with my mom.
There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story.
Crafting a piece of gripping, narrative true crime that engages the world is not that different from crafting a piece of crime fiction.
I read a lot growing up. It was kind of my comfort, you know; I loved it. I love story. I love narrative. I was academic. I wasn't particularly athletic. I didn't make the drill team. I didn't go out for sports.
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.
I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.
Over the years, I learned that in my career, unlike in life, sometimes my wheelchair is its own automatic door opener. I was able to win the OWN competition by applying one simple principle: be funny, and admit you suck before anyone else can call you out on it. In other words, make the narrative of your failure a comedy.
