narrative quotes

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it’s actually a being. ‚Harry Potter“s a good example. So Harry’s the hero, right. But he’s tainted with evil. There’s a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well balanced.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

History is written by the victors.

Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

Every story has its demands.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.

I’d been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it’s environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this ‚ambient music.‘ But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

‚Kiss Land‘ is the story after ‚Trilogy‘; it’s pretty much the second chapter of my life. The narrative takes place after my first flight; it’s very foreign, very Asian-inspired. When people ask me, ‚Why Japan?‘ I simply tell them it’s the furthest I’ve ever been from home. It really is a different planet.