A Quote by Scott Turow

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

Scott Turow

Quote Topics

Ambiguity Complexity Narrative Present Purpose Us

Quote Author

Scott Turow
American - Writer
Born: April 12, 1949

It's very difficult to understand, but I'm looking for a nonnarrative, multiscreen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us. It does not exist at all in nature; it is a construct made by us, and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore.

Peter Greenaway

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.

James Baldwin

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

Robert Redford

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

Claudia Rankine

Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don`t trust ambiguity. John Wayne

John Wayne

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

Nancy Kress

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

Steven Soderbergh

I've been told by people I respect that flashbacks only work if they have their own narrative, but they can't be part of the present narrative.

Jill Soloway

I can't see much purpose in archaeology unless you can find out the narrative about that place, or even realise that nobody actually knows what the narrative was.

Tony Robinson

Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

Laila Lalami

Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.

R. Scott Bakker

A God who draws near out of love, the Holy Father continued, walks with His people, and this walk comes to an unimaginable point. We could never have imagined that the same Lord would become one of us and walk with us, be present with us, present in His Church, present in the Eucharist, present in His Word, present in the poor, He is present, walking with us. And this is closeness: the shepherd close to his flock, close to his sheep, whom he knows, one by one.

Pope Francis

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.

Tommy Lee Jones

Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.