«Non è una frase genuina» protestai. «I mi spiace autentici sono di un rosa più tenue».Arricciò le labbra. «Ma sono anche troppo fragili». Stando a quanto avevo letto, era vero. La rarità era dovuta anche...

Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.”[Ten rules for writing fiction (The...

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were...

If you want to understand someone, figure out the narrative they tell themselves about themself. If you want to change your behavior, change your narrative. If you want to change someone else’s behavior, offer them...

There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time...

I write short, my words tight to the thread of the narrative.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops...

«Non tutte le parole sono precipitate al suolo» disse Lucio, trovando infine il coraggio di guardarmi negli occhi.Mi sforzai di dire qualcosa. «No?»«No» continuò, il volto ammorbidito. Era sollevato che avessi deciso di aprire bocca....

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. . .. . . (quoting an obituary) ‘There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever...

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

We want our children to know and believe the one good story. Every other story is a copy or shadow of this one. Some copies of it are quite good and shout the Truth. Others...

The most powerful words in English are, “Tell me a story.

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments – its power is not in narrative. I’m not dealing with facts, I’m dealing with emotion.

The ability to see our lives as stories and share those stories with others is at the core of what it means to be human. We use stories to order and make sense of our...

If we possess narrative sympathy – enabling us to see the world from other’s point of view – we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.

There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the...

We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment—narrative catechisms.

Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

Stories matter.

Berg was proud of his storytelling to the point where he collected stories about telling stories.

If thinking wants to think God, then it must endeavor to tell stories.

People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even...

The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences...

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and...

I hear music as narrative.

Yeah, episodic doesn’t work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it’s just narrative shit.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It’s just too bad.

Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.

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,...