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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In spite of the air of fable ... the public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the fac...ts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He was begotten in the galley and born under a gun. Every hair was a rope yarn, every finger a fish-hook, every tooth a marline-sp...ike, and his blood right good Stockholm tar.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The truth is despite the hard work and juggling required to keep the different facets of the frantic life afloat, the "superwoman"... has one marvelous compensation. Being busy and being seen to be busy lets you off the hook. Buys you a way out of all aspects of your many roles you secretly despise ... like cleaning cupboards ... or entertaining your husband's business friends. When you combine wife, mother, career and all, each role become the perfect excuse for avoiding the worst aspects of the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as ...personalities are the ones who lose that thread.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anestheti...c: 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrate...d, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While he hears in every spring How the birds do chirp and sing:... Or before the hounds in cry See the hare go stealing by: Or along the shallow brook, Angling with a baited hook, See the fishes leap and play In a blessed sunny day:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »