These narration quotes will inspire you. Narration means any kind of explaining or telling of something or the action or process of narrating a story.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging narration quotes, narration sayings, and narration proverbs.
Best Narration Quotes
- “I regard sports first and foremost as entertainment, so dry documentary narration is not for me.” ~ Jack Brickhouse
- “We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “With narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It’s a good exercise to do.” ~ Ben Kingsley
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“The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.” ~ Jacques Lacan
- “I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.” ~ Stephen King
- “Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood…. storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which everyday fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles, and ends.” ~ A. S. Byatt , Narration quotes storytelling
- “I get the impression from some people that unless they get direct access to characters’ thoughts and realizations, either through thought balloons or narrations or some sort of showy action, then those thoughts and realizations never existed.” ~ Adrian Tomine
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“The human race has always defined itself through narration. That isn’t going to change just because we’ve gone electronic. What is changing is that now we’re allowing corporations to tell our stories for us.” ~ Tom Robbins
- “Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It’s part ballet. It’s part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration, and that music, and in the end, create an inspirational piece of footage.” ~ Steve Sabol
- “I think all good narration contains an element of mystery and suspense. If it didn’t, if the storyline were predictable, we would have no interest in reading it.” ~ James Lee Burke
- “Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.” ~ Linda Grant
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“Trying to get the sentences right and the structure of the narration right is about as big a job as I can handle. But I also know that if you handle that job properly, everything else just clicks into place.” ~ Bob Shacochis
- “People, they think that animation is a style. Animation is just a technique. It’s like, people, they think that comics is a style like comics is a superhero story. The comic is just narration and is a medium, you can say any kind of story in comics and you can say of any kind of story in animation.” ~ Marjane Satrapi
- “These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike.” ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- “God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That’s flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.” ~ Robert McKee
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“Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw even an elemental trait of painting or sculpture.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “I’m working 2 days a week right now, narration usually on Wed., and host on camera on Friday.” ~ Robert Stack
- “It is commonly supposed that the uniformity of a studious life affords no matter for narration: but the truth is, that of the most studious life a great part passes without study. An author partakes of the common condition of humanity; he is born and married like another man; he has hopes and fears, expectations and disappointments, griefs and joys, and friends and enemies, like a courtier or a statesman; nor can I conceive why his affairs should not excite curiosity as much as the whisper of a drawing-room, or the factions of a camp.” ~ Samuel Johnson
- “But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to, and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.” ~ David Hume
- “Knowledge is not to be taken from four types of people: a foolish person who openly acts foolish, even if he reports the most narrations; an adherent of bid’ah who calls to his desires; a person who lies, even if I don’t accuse him of lying in hadith; and a righteous pious worshiper who does not accurately retain what he narrates.” ~ Malik ibn Anas
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“Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last, finds an out in narration one day. That’s a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.” ~ Barry Hannah
- “We believed – and I personally still believe – that the so-called Voice of God narration, ubiquitous in documentaries destined for PBS, is insulting to the audience. If you believe in the intelligence of your audience, you don’t need to tell them what to think and how to process the material they’re seeing.” ~ Jayne Loader
- “The great majority of modern third-person narration is “I” narration very thinly disguised.” ~ John Fowles
- “In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.” ~ Robert Morgan
- “Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“Education is suffering from narration sickness.” ~ Paulo Freire
- “When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction. Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters’ heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel so close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those characters.” ~ Jerome Stern
- “It is a wonderful thing that so many, and they not reckoned absurd shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the history of their pains and aches and imagine such narrations their quota of conversation.” ~ Richard Steele
- “I was desperately unhappy with it [Blade Runner]. I was compelled by contract to record five or six different versions of the narration, each of which was found wanting on a storytelling basis. The final version was something that I was completely unhappy with. The movie obviously has a very strong following, but it could have been more than a cult picture.” ~ Harrison Ford
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“I wasn’t aware I’d write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.” ~ Ben Lerner
- “So it became in my mind a nine-carol service; an oratorio and orchestral concert all in one, but with narration. That’s something I’ve learned about because it’s the story that keeps you in there. I wrote a libretto and I gave it to John Du Prez. We normally don’t work in this fashion but I said off you go, and he went off for about three months. He brought me back this demo which blew my mind.” ~ Eric Idle
- “I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.” ~ Aleksandar Hemon
- “I love working with Lars [von Trier]! I’ve worked with him three times. I did the narration of Dogville and Manderlay.” ~ John Hurt
- “Movie narration in the forties was radically different than the narrative involved in books.” ~ Robert Benton
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“I couldn’t sit down and write a novel or a short story – even now – because of my dyslexia. But I learned narration through movies.” ~ Robert Benton
- “To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.” ~ Joyce Carol Oates
- “I had never done a Director’s Cut narration on Beaches so I did in time for the release of the DVD. It was a great visit and I do a whole-behind-the-scenes thing and I tell stories about Bette [Mudler] and Barbara Hershey and everybody and that was fun. It made me cry again.” ~ Garry Marshall
- “I’ve always hated quotation marks: they’re ugly on the page and they classify the text for you, putting dialogue in one box and narration in another.” ~ Catherine Brady
- “It’s not the subject of narration that interests me, but the structure. That’s why I stay in touch with my old works, which I reread regularly. I don’t hesitate to take up previously used images or even whole scenes.” ~ Dumitru Tepeneag
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“It can stand in the way of narration in cases where we want the protagonist to actually go through some kind of catharsis while our own (non-fictional) experiences and stories lead to something banal or completely uninteresting.” ~ Sasa Stanisic
- “I got used to [ Lars Von Trier] doing the narration for ‘Dogville’ and ‘Manderley.’ And I said to him I do these narrations for you but you never put me in a film! So he called my bluff and put me in ‘Melancholia’ and I was thrilled about that.” ~ John Hurt
- “The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.” ~ Vivian Gornick
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“History is principally the inaccurate narration of events which ought not to have happened.” ~ Earnest Hooton
- “World events can shape culture. Music is either a soundtrack for or a narration of changing times. And who knows how that’s going to go?” ~ L.A. Reid
- “Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
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“Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character’s voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact.” ~ Griffin Dunne
- “When Veronica Mars was canceled, the following season of pilots for The CW had been announced, and one was Gossip Girl. I read it, and I knew I was sort of old to play any of the kids. I called Dawn Ostroff — who was the head of The CW at the time — and said, ‘Hey, I did so much narration on Veronica Mars, can I narrate this show? And she said, ‘Hey, that’s a very good idea.’ They knew I had a younger voice, they liked me and they knew I’d show up for work, and I guess that was all I really needed. It was so clear to me how sassy and catty she needed to be.” ~ Kristen Bell
- “In ‘Labor Day Hurricane, 1935,’ Douglas Trevor vividly recreates a historical event. While that is the only story in A THIN TEAR IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE in the historical past, many of the other stories juxtapose fact-both historical and scientific-with narration to an engaging effect, one that distinguishes the voice of this new writer.” ~ Stuart Dybek
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“Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.” ~ A. S. Byatt
- “The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic ‘I’ is an over reliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.” ~ Janet Malcolm
- “[On School Uniforms] Don’t these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they have to make them look alike too? It’s not a new idea, either. I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand because the narration was in German.” ~ George Carlin
- “If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us–through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives–we are each of us unique.” ~ Oliver Sacks
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“Time is the nervous system of narration, whether factual or fictive. If it gets confused some of the minutiae of human nature are certain not to work, not to glow, not to strike home.” ~ Glenway Wescott]
- “A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe’s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.” ~ Herman Melville
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“If I write nothing but fiction for some time I begin to get stupid, and to feel rather as if it had been a long meal of sweets; then history is a rest, for research or narration brings a different part of the mind into play.” ~ Charlotte Mary Yonge
- “I regard sports first and foremost as entertainment, so dry documentary narration is not for me. I like the ‘let’s forget our troubles and have some excitement’ approach. I’m convinced you can combine this with reporting integrity and accuracy.” ~ Jack Brickhouse
- “If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.” ~ David Hume
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“Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise, you have not got dramatic action, you’ve got narration.” ~ David Mamet
- “If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).” ~ David Mamet
- “I don’t like making didactic, pedagogical documentaries based on standard formulas of narration: I’m only interested in the ambitious French tradition of the documentaire de création where the film, if successful, is not about something but that something itself. The goal is to incorporate areas of risk and paradox that we associate with cinematic art.” ~ Damian Pettigrew
- “The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts and combine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything like anybody else; but the end in view is generally the same, and the historian’s end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.” ~ Augustine Birrell
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“landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.” ~ Patricia Hampl
- “There are, occasionally, writers who are able to combine both story and style. They are, of course, the best. You get a spectacular view and you also get to look at it from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In the field of fantasy, those writers able to combine story-as-narration with story-as-style are even rarer. But there are a few…the late Theodore Sturgeon, the early Ray Bradbury…and Richard Christian Matheson. A brilliant chip off the old block.” ~ Stephen King
- “This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We’re a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse, and dreary discourse would need to be invented.” ~ Michel Houellebecq
