The fourth and most important difference between a novel and a film (or play) is that when the reader tires of a novel he can mark his place, put it down, and return to it later. But the attention of an audience must be held continuously. There must be an unbroken progression. It may be progression of the emotion or the thought or the action, but emotion and thought must issue in action or threaten to. In a dramatic medium such as film the characters cannot pause to propound ideas and emotions not directly relevant to their own dramatic situation. In the middle of War and Peace Tolstoy can plant a substantial essay on the nature of military power. In a film script one unnecessary page, one page not furthering the progression, will lose the attention of the audience for the next ten.
Robert Bolt (1924-1995) English dramatist
Doctor Zhivago: The Screenplay, “Author’s Note” (1965)
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Quotations about:
narrative
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
That is just the way with Memory; nothing that she brings to us is complete. She is a willful child; all her toys are broken. I remember tumbling into a huge dust-hole when a very small boy, but I have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again; and if memory were all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to believe I was there still.
Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) English writer, humorist [Jerome Klapka Jerome]
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, “On Memory” (1886)
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First published in Home Chimes (1885-09-26).
If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, ch. 8 [Malicia] (2008)
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History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.
Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) American historian, writer, activist
The Nature and the Study of History, ch. 5 (1965)
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“Yes,” he said. “But I wonder … I’ve a peculiar feeling that I may never see you again. It is as if I were one of those minor characters in a melodrama who gets shuffled offstage without ever learning how things turn out.”
“I can appreciate the feeling,” I said. “My own role sometimes makes me want to strangle the author. But look at it this way: inside stories seldom live up to one’s expectations. Usually they are grubby little things, reducing down to the basest of motives when all is known. Conjectures and illusions are often the better possessions.”
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) American writer
Sign of the Unicorn (1972)
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Bill Roth speaking with Corwin.
It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and showing us yet another chapter.
A person, an individual being, has a thousand ways of conveying his feelings and thoughts. He is riches without end, he is a world in which we can always discover something new. A crowd, on the other hand, reduces the individuality of the person; a man in a crowd limits himself to a few forms of elementary behavior. The forms through which a crowd can express its yearnings are extraordinarily meager and continually repeat themselves: the demonstration, the strike, the rally, the barricades. That is why you can write a novel about a man, but about a crowd — never.
Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007) Polish journalist, photographer, poet, author
Shah of Shahs, Part 3 “The Dead Flame” (1982)
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“Inevitability” is a magic word with which to mesmerize the unwary. Only death is inevitable. Short of that, nothing is inevitable until it happens, and everything is inevitable once it has happened. The historian deals with past events and therefore to him all history is inevitable. But these past events were once in the future, and then they were not inevitable.
The whole truth would be an infinite concatenation of mostly irrelevant facts, with an occasional dose of, in textspeak, “TMI,” too much information — when, for example, you ruin the case you were making against factory farming by going into such detail about how painful de-beaking is for chickens that your listener shuts you out and struggles to think about something else. So we do not tell the whole truth; we tell carefully crafted stories, and we do this even when our moral purpose is to tell the truth.
Justin E. H. Smith (b. 1972) American-Canadian professor of history and philosophy of science
Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, ch. 8 (2019)
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History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.
A. J. P. Taylor (1906-1990) British historian, journalist, broadcaster [Alan John Percivale Taylor]
(Attributed)
Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense. … Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history — or at least history since the Middle Ages — had no other aim than Auschwitz. … This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how: is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
Interview with Roger Errera (Oct 1973), The New York Review of Books (26 Oct 1978)
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We are each the star of our own situation comedy, and, with luck, the screwball friend in someone else’s.
Robert Brault (b. c. 1945) American aphorist, programmer
(Attributed)
I have regarded you, not as a novelist, but as an historian; for it is my considered opinion, unshaken at 85, that records of fact are not history. They are only annals, which cannot become historical until the artist-poet-philosopher rescues them from the unintelligible chaos of their actual occurrence and arranges them in works of art.
When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your novels. They object that the people in your books never existed; that their deeds were never done and their sayings never uttered. I assure them that they were, except that Upton Sinclair individualized and expressed them better than they could have done, and arranged their experiences, which as they actually occurred were as unintelligible as pied type, in significant and intelligible order.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British playwright and critic
Letter to Upton Sinclair (12 Dec 1941)
If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) American writer, folklorist, anthropologist
(Attributed)
Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, critic
(Attributed)
Advice to persons about to write History: Don’t. […]
In the Moral Sciences Prejudice is Dishonesty.
A Historian has to fight against temptations special to his mode of life, temptations from Country, Class, Church, College, Party, Authority of talents, solicitation of friends.
The most respectable of these influences are the most dangerous.
The historian who neglects to root them out is exactly like a juror who votes according to his personal likes or dislikes.
In judging men and things Ethics go before Dogma, Politics or Nationality.
The Ethics of History cannot be denominational.
Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience.
Put conscience above both System and Success.
History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.John Dalberg, Lord Acton (1834-1902) British historian, politician, writer
Letter (1887-04-05) to Mandell Creighton
The present, as historians well know, re-creates the past. This is partly because, once we know how things have come out, we tend to rewrite the past in terms of historical inevitability.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) American historian, author, social critic
“The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus (Spring 1971)
INNKEEPER: Was that the truth, Cluracan?
CLURACAN: All of it except the sword-fight with the palace guard, which I threw in to add verisimilitude, excitement, and local color to an otherwise bald and insipid narrative.
Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) British author, screenwriter, fabulist
Sandman, Book 8. World’s End, # 52 “Cluracan’s Tale” (1993-08)
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I had wanted to wrap this book up in a neat little package about a girl who is a comedienne from Detroit, becomes famous in New York, with all the world coming her way, gets this horrible disease of cancer, is brave and fights it, learning all the skills she needs to get through it, and then, miraculously, things are neatly tied up and she gets well. I wanted to be able to write on the book jacket: “Her triumph over cancer” or “She wins the cancer war.” I wanted a perfect ending, so I sat down to write the book with the ending in place before there even was an ending.
Now I’ve learned, the hard way. that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Like my life, this book has ambiguity. Like my life, this book is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity, as Joanna said.Gilda Radner (1946-1989) American comedian
It’s Always Something, ch. 16 “Change” (1989)
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Joanna was Radner's psychotherapist.
