It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I’ve written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don’t...

During the second half of the twentieth century, cross-fertilization among the disciplines of history, literature, sociology, and psychology led to scholarly awareness that historical accounts are not direct representations of actual events; they are, instead,...

I think that rap is narrative, when it’s done right.

The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this...

I’m Godless. I’ve had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.

Because I write fiction, I don’t write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as ‘I’ – you...

false convictions” by defense lawyers and political activists deserve far greater scrutiny from the media and the public.journal: Cheit, Ross E. “The Legend of Robert Halsey.” Journal of child sexual abuse 9.3-4 (2002): 37-52.

Story should be a descent — the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down.

You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you...

Never miss an opportunity to be truly and deeply humiliated! The shame will carve you down to an individual of exquisite layering, and in the process, etch within you the arcs of exceptional narrative.

By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth,...

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

The stars are brilliant at this time of night and I wander these streets like a ritual I don’t dare to break for darling, the times are quite glorious.I left him by the water’s edge,still...

Everyone listened to this amusing narrative with great interest, and the moment that Behemoth concluded it, they all shouted in unison: ‘Lies!

witch hunters,” as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate...

I’d never had a mind for math. … It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a...

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of...

It is safe to assume that any individual or group you wish to influence has access to more wisdom than they currently use. It is also safe to assume that they also have considerably more...

Discipline is aimed at formation for a specific end, and that end is determined by our founding narrative.

If I’ve vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence,...

Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.

All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth — yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes...

In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the...

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing…sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it...

The question of the relation between modernity and postmodernity revolves around the issue of ‘legitimation.’ Modernity, then, appeals to science to legitimate its claim – and by ‘science’ we simply mean the notion of a...

What character with any sense of aesthetics desires a cradle-to-grave account of himself? That’s so passé, so nineteenth-century.

Narratives are the primary way in which we make sense of our lives, as opposed to, for example schema,cognition, beliefs, constructs. Definition of narrative include the important element of giving meaning to events and experiences...

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going...

Writers use narratives to select from everything there is, and make contexts by putting the pieces into relation; that’s what writers do, they make contexts.

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which...

Readers don’t want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions. . . . Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face...