Unlike some of the time-travel movies I love like 'Primer' or '12 Monkeys ' 'Looper' is not about time travel. It's about this situation that time travel creates and the people dealing with that situation. So narratively the big challenge was to have time travel get out of the way.

I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well.

The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism ' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean in a certain sense Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.

More generally I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic poetic countercultural rebel on one side and the serious businessperson on the other.

Most religions live from a narrative that shapes their relationship with the divine other God or the gods and with the human other the stranger.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that though lacking a novel's length satisfies the reader.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent be it epic or drama or narrative is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

In my opinion the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre they are at the same time poetry criticism narrative drama etc.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Narrative art the novel from Murasaki to Proust has produced great works of poetry.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative a contemporary American vernacular.

My mom used to tell me stories at night read books to me - and I read 'em over and over and over again. And you know what I learned from that? I went back and looked at everything - Why do I like reading the same stories over and over and over again? What was I some kind of nincompoop? No - the narrative gave me connection with my mom.

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

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

With fiction you can talk about plot character and narrative whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which in turn can become history. It's scary.

My idea in terms of managing a narrative or in thinking in my creative life is that you could easily argue that the past the present and the future all occur simultaneously and if you can postulate that then you're not strictly bound to a linear narrative.

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

Propelled by freedom of faith gender equality and economic justice for all India will become a modern nation. Minor blemishes cannot cloak the fact that India is becoming such a modern nation: no faith is in danger in our country and the continuing commitment to gender equality is one of the great narratives of our times.

There's a logic to dreams that doesn't necessarily follow linear narrative. You don't know why things happen it's your subconscious pushing you to give you information.

Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives little stories. I thought 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'

The best films of any kind narrative or documentary provoke questions.