#narrative

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space. ↗

— Jonathan Lethem

#get #good #great #head #holding

If you are making a script based on a book it can be frustrating going back to the source novel, because you're turning the story into a totally different thing; the narrative of film is different from that of a book. ↗

— Clive Owen

#based #because #book #different #different thing

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration. ↗

— Richard Schickel

#become #characters #concerned #decoration #exercises

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

— Terry Tempest Williams

#disappearance #intelligence #language #narrative #beauty

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative. ↗

— Nicholas Mosley

#did #except #form #i #knew

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. ↗

— Stan Sakai

#companions #first #folk #funny #heroes

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 happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#j-r-r-tolkien #life-and-death #life-story #lord-of-the-rings #lotr

...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 to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively. ↗

— Javier Marías

#existential #narrative #writing #death

Language allows us to represent autobiographical events in the past, present and future; we can imagine events that have not yet happened, that we wish to happen or fear will happen. Jerome Bruner first proposed narratives as the best candidate for how people give meaning to the world, themselves and dominated in our everyday representation of our lives, rather than narrower units that featured in the information processing paradigm at that time. ↗

— Jacqui Stedmon

#narratives #imagination

When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy! ↗

— Barbara Conelli

#chique-secrets-of-dolce-vita #italy #travel #travel-essays #travel-narrative-nonfiction