To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the...

There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can’t explain without handing over a full map of one’s life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand for...

If you do a sketch, that’s a very short narrative. Stand-up, it’s bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our...

I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did...

December 29, 1946: Snowing this morning. The year seems to be dying in a light white blanket. Only three more days of this year, then comes a new one. Then, what? No one knows. —...

Reading stories forces us to exercise our empathy and imagination muscles, and that helps us conceive what the Bible depicts or demands, helps us connect with others, helps us illustrate what the text teaches, and...

The Princess BrideS. Morgenstern’sClassic Tale of True Loveand High AdventureYou had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone had a chance to read it.

…and yet the idea is hard to accept, it’s so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what’s been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough...

In the end, it wasn’t so much that there was an alternative narrative–there always was–but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more...

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

We want the author to give us answers when all he can do is give us desires.

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The...

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the...

«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.