Narrators Quotes

Narrators Quote of the day

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

A miracle signifies nothing more than an event... the cause of which cannot be explained by another familiar instance, or.... which the narrator is unable to explain.

I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be.

The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.

Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

I can't reasonably pretend to be a transparent and omniscient narrator who brings no personal perspective. That person doesn't exist.

I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

Simply adored Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope: the voice of Essie, the narrator, is terrific & the last line blew me away.

My narrators tend to be women with low self-esteem, so I can send them to charm school.

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

I used to be a narrator for bad mimes.

In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.

I think narrators expect a high level of intimacy with their readers, and vice versa.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.

I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can't totally be trusted.

Lauren Kirshner creates a first-person narrator you never stop rooting for. . . . [Where We Have to Go] highlights Kirshner as a new novelist to watch. A very strong, original debut.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

***A Last note from your narrator*** I am haunted by humans.

My biggest lesson ... was to try and create narrators that were believable. ...so the listener becomes really invested in the story or the song.

Using a dog as a narrator has limitations and it has advantages. The limitations are that a dog cannot speak. A dog has no thumbs. A dog can't communicate his thoughts except with gestures.

As a writer I'm not an explainer, really. I'm a narrator. I mistrust explanation.

Narrator: You had to give it to him: he had a plan. And it started to make sense, in a Tyler sort of way. No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to unreliable.

I chose the title Dogwalker because that describes me pretty well. I spend a lot of time walking around with my dogs. I'd say the narrator is me in an alternate universe.

I wanted to do a collection where the narrator is constant throughout, so that there's a little unity.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

One naturally identifies to some extent with an "I" female narrator going through something that you recognize whether you've gone through it or not.