Quotations on / about narrative

The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.

(Italo Calvino (1923-1985), Italian author, critic. "Cinema and the Novel: Problems of Narrative," The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh, Harcourt Brace (1986).)
More quotations from: Italo Calvino

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

(Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694-1773), British statesman, man of letters. Letter, October 19, 1748. The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son, vol. 1, no. 166, ed. Charles Strachey (1901).)
More quotations from: 4th Earl Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

(E.L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow (b. 1931), U.S. novelist. New York Times Book Review (Jan. 27, 1988).)
More quotations from: E.L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow

Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.

(Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), British historian. repr. As Autobiography (1971). Memoirs of my Life, introduction (1796).)
More quotations from: Edward Gibbon

The ninety percent of human experience that does not fit into established narrative patterns falls into oblivion.

(Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Fifth Selection, New York (1988).)
More quotations from: Mason Cooley

Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.

(Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian author, playwright. Letter, January 15, 1889, to A.N. Pleshcheev. Complete Works and Letters in Thirty Volumes, Letters, vol. 3, p. 139, "Nauka" (1976).)
More quotations from: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.

(E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster (1879-1970), British novelist, essayist. Aspects of the Novel, ch. 5, Harcourt (1927).)
More quotations from: E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression—a kind of rudimentary theater—as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.

(John Barth (b. 1930), U.S. novelist, educator. "The Role of the Prosaic in Fiction," The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction, Putnam (1984).)
More quotations from: John Barth

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

(James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 5. The culmination of Stephen Dedalus's aesthetic theory as the artist recedes from the center to the periphery of his product.)
More quotations from: James Joyce

Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result is Fantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative.

(Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968), British critic, poet. English Prose Style, ch. 9, Holt (1928).)
More quotations from: Sir Herbert Read