Narrative Art Quotes & Sayings

I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography. — Don McCullin

For anyone who wants to understand the art of storytelling, this film [The Hunt for Red October] should suffice; one wonders why universities persist in teaching narrative principles on the basis of Propp, Greimas or other such punishing curricula, instead of investing in a projection room. Premise, plot, protagonists, adventures, quest, heroes and other stimulants: all you need is Sean Connery in the uniform of a Russian submarine officer and a few well-placed aircraft carriers. — Muriel Barbery

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it ... The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. — Walter Benjamin

Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama. — Flannery O'Connor

There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure on current notions of accessible (and acceptable) narrative methods. To thrive and change and grow, any art needs this kind of pressure. — Joanna Scott

Characters last. Beautiful writing lasts. A compelling narrative lasts. Art survives long after ideas go extinct ... — Joel Achenbach

There's nothing else exactly like it in any other art form, the orchestration of so many different elements. It's endlessly fascinating what can be done editorially. You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn't. It's fascinating. — Steven Soderbergh

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be? — Stephen King

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact. — Jerry Saltz

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form. — Tom Stoppard

Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper. — Elizabeth McCracken

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. — Brian Eno

[My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge. — Nicolas Provost

When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work. — Tom Robbins

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, — Philip Yancey

... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician's art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it's fascinating, it's fun, and it's free! — Paul Lockhart

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

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative.The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated ... All art to me is about problem solving. — Steven Soderbergh

A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did. — Martin Filler

The typical English painting is narrative in character. The English are a nation of diarists. — Neville Weston

OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio's genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth. — Nick Flynn

Whatever experimental film aromas cloaked my movies were because I'm a gleefully clumsy, primitive filmmaker. I really like traditional pleasingly narrative films, but I also just couldn't resist throwing in the disruptive. It seems to me that art-house film is at its glorious zenith right now, maybe it can even get better? There's just so many good films, you know Cemetery Of Splendour, Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes, just so much great work coming out. — Guy Maddin

The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such. — Ron Silliman

The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different. — David Adjaye

By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite. — Steven Pinker

Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at 'The New Yorker,' wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, 'Hiroshima.' Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form. — Hampton Sides

If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality. — Chris Abani

Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative. — F. Sionil Jose

The next time you feel yourself giving in to the sometimes overwhelming urge to panic about the fate of literature in the digital age, follow this simple remedy: remember that you dream. For that is ironclad proof ... that literature - that narrative art in whatever form - will never die. Humans, strange creatures that we are, make sense of our lives by telling stories. In the space between each day and the next, we refresh our minds by concocting the most fantastic and elaborate fictions. We spend roughly a third of our lives thus, re-arranging our scattered experiences into stories. That we do it at all is bizarre and inexplicable. But as long as we do it, we will crave stories - human stories, stories that speak to us - in our waking life. The Internet, powerful as it is, cannot change that. — Adam Hammond

Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative ... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions. — Kiki Smith

This is a story of art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being. — J. Jack Halberstam

In Red Flags, Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished a feat that is becoming a major characteristic of 21st century literature: the seamless combining of a genre form with the deep resonance of literary art. This book is thrilling to read for both its narrative drive and its insight into the human heart. — Robert Olen Butler

All of that art-for-art's-sake stuff is BS," she declares. "What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren't writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn't. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, 'We love the status quo.' We've just dirtied the word 'politics,' made it sound like it's unpatriotic or something." Morrison laughs derisively. "That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was 'No, no, no; there's only aesthetics.' My point is that is has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I'm not interested in art that is not in the world. And it's not just the narrative, it's not just the story; it's the language and the structure and what's going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story. — Toni Morrison

What sets 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children' apart is Riggs's use of 'found' photographs as a spark of inspiration for the narrative. 'Found' describes art created from common objects that are not normally considered art. — Claire Cameron

I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor — Ben Lerner

One of the things I've been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it's some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books. — Kevin Barry

The best way to truly understand narrative art is to experience it. — George Lucas

We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth, if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos - these are the promises art makes. — Kathryn Harrison

For me, where genre ends and literature begins doesn't matter. What matters is whether a given novel hits me with high impact. If it does, it probably is fulfilling the purpose of fiction. It has drawn me into a story world, held me captive, taken me on a journey with characters like none I've ever met, revealed truths I've somehow always known and insights that rock my brain. It's filled me with awe, which is to say it's made me see the familiar in a wholly new way and made the unfamiliar a foundational part of me. It both entertains and matters. It both captures our age and becomes timelessly great. It does all that with the sturdy tools of story and the flair of narrative art. — Donald Maass

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. — Eugenio Montale

[ ... ] a familiar art historical narrative [ ... ] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [ ... ] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis. — Grant H. Kester

Your life will contribute to a grand and wonderful story no matter what you do. You have been spoken. You are here, existing, choosing, living, shaping the future and carving the past. Your physical matter and your soul exist, not out of necessity, not voluntarily, and not under their own strength. There is absolutely nothing that you or I can do to guarantee that we will continue to exist. You aren't doing anything that makes you be. We aren't the Author. You and I are spoken. We have been called into this art as characters, born into this thread of occurrence tumbling downstream in the long Niagara of loss set in motion by the trouble that faced our first father and first mother. We will contribute to this narrative. But how? — N.D. Wilson

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time. — Aleksandar Hemon

I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about. — Tilda Swinton

But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative - the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory - it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we're to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it. — Michael Copperman

Art in the United States is a kind of visual entertainment focusing on expected narratives. — Massimiliano Gioni

The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature. — Sol LeWitt

A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story. — Thomas Boswell

To spend any time with someone who is among the top five film composers of the last 50 years is pure gold dust. I mean, not necessarily stylistically, because everyone is different in what their music sounds like, but the approach and how to look at a film, how to think about a film, how to decide what you want to do, how to think about characters, how to think about art, how to think about narrative, how to liaise with producers, how to liaise with directors. — Henry Jackman

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories... All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not...

Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? — Karl Ove Knausgard

Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight ... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty. — Stephanie Mills

We all have an aggressive dedication to the narrative arts - comics, film, electronic gaming, and more. We spend much of our time and effort exploring those forms and have an enormous investment in the arts. We're all part of the same brotherhood as far as I'm concerned. — Jim Steranko

Art brings a message into a room. It should make us perceive in a new way - either through color, form or narrative content - something we had not perceived before ... and perhaps reveal something to you about yourself. — Gloria Vanderbilt

McEwan's Atonement ... truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past ... . The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel ... . There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes - the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression - into his narrative, and in a magical love scene. — Noah Richler

The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone. — Karl Ove Knausgard

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form. — George Hickenlooper

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood. — Claudia Rankine

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature.
Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated.
I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts.
I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true. — Susan Sontag

[W]hen the modern mythmaker, the writer of literary fairy tales, dares to touch the old magic and try to make it work in new ways, it must be done with the surest of touches. It is, perhaps, a kind of artistic thievery, this stealing of old characters, settings, the accoutrements of magic. But then, in a sense, there is an element of theft in all art; even the most imaginative artist borrows and reconstructs the archetypes when delving into the human heart. That is not to say that using a familiar character from folklore in the hopes of shoring up a weak narrative will work. That makes little sense. Unless the image, character, or situation borrowed speaks to the author's condition, as cryptically and oracularly as a dream, folklore is best left untapped. — Jane Yolen