Barns Quote by Anthony Lane

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as…

— Mavis Gallant

“Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“The suspense: the fearful, acute suspense: of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance; the…

— Charles Dickens

There's a certain joy in taking a dramatic narrative and then adding that element of horror to it.

— Lauren Ashley Carter

“These dynamics are, Sedgwick argues, at the center of the "paranoid Gothic"; narratives like Frankenstein or Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which…

— Noah Berlatsky

“What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the unusual position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the…

— Tom Rachman

For me, even in the most subtle and introspective story, it's all about tension: this is the thread that ties a reader to story,…

— Samanta Schweblin

“Might it also be that creating narratives around murder allows a measure of comfort? Murder in the abstract is terrifying; in the details, you…

— Emily Maguire

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

— Evelyn Waugh

Everything in dancing is style, allusion, the essence of many thoughts and feelings. The abstraction of many moments.

— Alvin Ailey

Jane Austen can in fact get more drama out of morality than most other writers can get from shipwreck, battle, murder, or mayhem.

— Ronald Blythe

“Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a…

— Ruth Padel