Narratives Quotations

Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development.

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 often doing it better with more complex narratives and corresponding budgets.

It's seldom that you find great moments in television. Usually you remember - in 'Breaking Bad' or any of these other great shows - you remember situations or characters. Not moments. But I have to say, I can make the same argument for mainstream movies, which have bad narratives and also no memorable moments.

The religious imagery and fairytales that formed our shared cultural references have been replaced by the cult of celebrity. Marilyn is the sex goddess, Camilla Parker Bowles is cast as the wicked witch, Che Guevara is the revolutionary. Celebrities have become visual shorthand for narratives that shape our lives.

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions.

When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.

Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.

The media doesn't create narratives, really. They're not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.

African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.

Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood.

Galbraith argued that the truly important economic issues must be evaluated through the lens of economics, politics, sociology, law, ideology and history simultaneously, and that economic analysis and prescription must always keep front and centre both the factors of power and the narratives that societies use to tell their economic stories.

'Pierrot le Fou' is something I keep coming back to. It's so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.

Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.

There are very few slave narratives because it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write. This man remembered being captured in Africa when he was 16. He remembers vividly the voyage to the Caribbean Islands, being sold to a ship's captain.

There has been a failure to grasp how competing narratives fight for the attention of angry young Muslims, and we have grossly underestimated the appeal of the jihadist brand.

Confronting and undermining the narratives and ideas of extremism must therefore be one of our key tasks. To do this, we must retain the courage of our convictions in the face of extremism.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

Extremist perspectives win sympathy and recruits because they offer narratives that claim to identify deep injustices and enemies.

A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.

You see people taking storytelling more seriously, ... Shows like 'Lost' and '24' have complex narratives you couldn't think about doing in film.

I'm mostly drawn to narratives that are difficult for me to visualize.

The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house.

They are hybrid narratives so that the viewer constructs his or her own story.

There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.

It was commissioned by Center Theatre Group's youth program, ... They wanted something based on storytelling, something suitable for whole families. It was supposed to incorporate Br'er Rabbit tales. But once I got into it, I thought, 'Forget Br'er Rabbit. Use human beings.' There are so very, very many African, African American, Caribbean and slave narratives to work with.