Top 100 First Person Quotes
#1. I'm always fascinated by the use of the first-person plural talking about sports.
Penn Jillette
#2. And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.
William Eggleston
#3. Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.
Matt Mullenweg
#4. When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.
Daphne Du Maurier
#5. Teenagers have more intense reading experiences because they've had fewer of them. It's like the first time you fall in love. You have a connection to that first person you fell in love with because it was so intense and unprecedented.
John Green
#6. I think I might be the very first person who initiated the AutoQuotery (as in, AutoBiography) practice!
Ibrahim Ibrahim
#7. All my movies have an autobiographical dimension, but that is indirectly, through the personages. In fact, I am behind everything that happens and that is said, but I am never talking about myself in first person singular.
Pedro Almodovar
#8. Coming in second place just means you were the first person to lose ...
Jeff Hawkins
#9. With the adult ones, I feel I need to get as deep inside the psychology of a character as I can, and that needs to be first-person. In the children's books, I feel I need some distance. I don't want to be the nine-year-old at the center of the story. I need to have some type of narrative voice.
John Boyne
#10. Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie.
Gary Kemp
#11. I'm not the first person to have said this - no writer ever feels that the execution of a book lives up to the idea for that book. The execution always falls short.
Stephen King
#12. Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.
Aaron Sorkin
#13. I can't tell you what that little ingredient is which makes that first person want to go on and aggressively do more, and the other person be content to not do that. It's a mystery, but it does happen.
Sam Donaldson
#14. But lots of people do parody now. The whole mash-up thing that's so prevalent now was starting in the 80's when I was starting to think about this stuff. I certainly wasn't the first person to do it but now ... comics mash-ups, all kinds of mash-ups are everywhere.
Robert Sikoryak
#15. I don't know. But I do know that I'm at the stage of my life where I want forever, not right now.
I know that the first person I kissed won't be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.
And I also know better than to dream about things that can't happen.
Jodi Picoult
#16. My father was an innovator. He's the first person who sang and set Rumi's poetry into music 35 years, 40 years ago.
Hafez Nazeri
#17. Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.
Kate Christensen
#18. There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along ...
Rainer Maria Rilke
#19. I know that the first person I kissed won't be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.
Jodi Picoult
#20. The truth is, I hate not being the first person narrator all the way through! To paraphrase David Copperfield, I don't know whether I'm the hero or the victim of this tale. But either way, shouldn't I dominate it?
Anne Rice
#21. As far as I could tell, I was the first person anywhere in my family tree to go to university.
Clive Granger
#22. I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming - the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and Internet play, game mods, and so on.
John Carmack
#23. For every person who will say yes, there are twenty who will say no. For a positive response you must find the twenty-first person.
Chuck Reaves
#24. They could be subjected to the worst of circumstances and yet give their love to the first person who showed it back. If people could learn that simple aspect, there might be a chance of saving this world.
Simon Wood
#25. Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.
Tim O'Reilly
#26. All of the narration in 'Smile' is first-person. Most of the books that I grew up reading had first-person narrators for some reason. My diaries were written in this voice, and since this story is autobiographical, it just felt like a natural extension.
Raina Telgemeier
#27. I trust my mum with anything. If I have a problem, my mum is always the first person I go to.
Richard Fleeshman
#28. If I ever thought I wasn't the right guy for the job, I'd be the first person to fire myself.
Andrew Mason
#29. Novels are political because in them, we try to identify with people who are not like us. And, in that sense, I like the first-person singular because I have to imitate accurately the voice of someone who is not like me. The third-person singular gives me an authority over a character.
Orhan Pamuk
#30. I pull my cigarette from my mouth and take a look around, meeting the eyes of my friends carefully,so they'll know how serious I am right now. First person to laugh gets punched.I'm in love.
C.M. Stunich
#31. When you're the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you're basically saying, "I'm right, and everyone else is wrong." That's a very unpleasant position to be in. It's at once exhilarating and at the same time an invitation to be attacked.
Larry Ellison
#32. Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way - a first-order, first-person experience - rather than filtered through the mind of another.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#33. My dad was a singer in a band and neither of my parents went to college, and I ended up getting into Harvard and was the first person in my family that went to college and it happened to be Harvard.
Dean Norris
#34. Nothing is more vulgar than a careful avoidance of beginning a letter with the first person singular)
Dorothy L. Sayers
#35. I like people who tell stories. I like storytellers. A lot of my songs are misconceived as being auto-biographical when they're not because I write in the first person.
Art Alexakis
#36. In a very basic way, a prominent landmark such as Mt. Holyoke tells you where you are. They let you know that you're not the first person in a place.
Tracy Kidder
#37. A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
Alexandre Dumas
#38. My novels are written in first person so you can feel the emotion of the character.
Airam
#39. Who was the first person to walk into a harbor and say, "Whatever that horrible smell is I want to eat it"
Jim Gaffigan
#40. We?' said Chancellor.
'I am lavishly paid,' Danny said, 'to think in the first person plural.
Dorothy Dunnett
#41. On the way I thought about how millions of people drowned so that the first person could learn to swim. The amazing thing is that people still drown.
Shahrnush Parsipur
#42. When you're writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.
Pearl Cleage
#43. The first person to refer to Darwin's tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61
Tom Wolfe
#44. You don't want to be the first person to tell your 5-year-old, like, 'You're going to have a life filled with disappointments and letdowns - enjoy!'
Maya Rudolph
#45. Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.
Damien Chazelle
#46. The whole atmosphere of the book, the tone of 'The Hobbit,' is of a kid's adventure story, told in the first person by Tolkien, who is introducing young people to the notion of Middle-earth. A lot of it is very light-hearted.
Ian McKellen
#47. A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future - and more - that enlists the participants as 'first-person forecasters.'
Howard Rheingold
#48. 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.
Rick Moody
#49. The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have.
Daniel Handler
#50. I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.
Joan Didion
#51. I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that's a big deal. And if you're going to be a leader - if you're a leader and you're the smartest guy in the world - in the room, you've got real problems.
Jack Welch
#52. The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.
Paul Theroux
#53. Ask successful men or women about their early years in business, and nearly every one will be able to tell you about the first person who showed faith in his or her abilities or offered genuine encouragement.
Cathie Black
#54. People go through life and make personal decisions and sometimes they don't work out. I won't be the first person to be divorced.
Tiki Barber
#55. Yves Saint Laurent was the first person who made me feel like a woman.
Laetitia Casta
#57. The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how.
Roger Scruton
#58. The point is that you free the ego. The ego is only a pronoun. It's a Greek first person pronoun, ergo. When you're in Greece you say, Ergo wants to take a bus, and you don't mean your ego wants to take a bus, like some big entity, you only mean I want to take a bus.
Robert Thurman
#59. Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling, Nneoma said.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#60. I was Patient Zero. The first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the Internet.
Monica Lewinsky
#61. I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.
Anne Rice
#62. I always loved song writers who wrote songs in the first person, so it's kind of like that.
Cameron Crowe
#63. Back turned, you don't have to look at what you've left behind. And the first person who turned their back on you can't watch you break down and cry.
Ellen Hopkins
#64. Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it.
Jean Kerr
#65. We have a choice in our lives. We can be content with where we are, or we can set goals and continue to push ourselves beyond our limits. I'm ready to keep doing that. I want to be the first person with cerebral palsy to climb the tallest free-standing mountain in the world.
Bonner Paddock
#67. One moment you can say the words 'I am'. And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.
Lynne Truss
#68. Bettie Page was the first person to do bondage as fashion, because for her it really was all about dressing up.
Mary Harron
#69. The first person you fell in love with stole your heart. The first person you made love with stole your soul. And if these were one and the same, you were damned.
Jodi Picoult
#70. Matangi's mantra is aim, which is MIA backwards. She fights for freedom of speech and stands for truth, and lives in the ghetto because her dad was the first person in Hindu mythology who came from the 'hood, but had gained enlightenment through not being a Brahmin.
M.I.A.
#71. 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.
Rachel Kushner
#72. He's the first person I want to tell when somebody upsets me; my foot pressing on the accelerator, desperate to get home from work just to tell him, the moment I tell him, the moment his face lights up with fury on my behalf, it's better, it's fixed.
Liane Moriarty
#74. I love writing in first person more than third. I have to basically suspend my own world. I don't exist. I'm just a conduit. So I can be eight years old. I can be the mother of a kid that you find out certain things I'm not going to say.
Terry McMillan
#75. When we were first offered a book deal prior to Avon's, they were trying to get us to change it from the first-person story into a how-to book, and they were offering us some decent money. My agent told me; 'you should really consider this'.
Kenny Loggins
#76. The basic principle, and the principles of chiropractic which have been developed from it are not new. They are as old as the vertebrae ... I am not the first person to replace subluxated vertebra, for this art has been practiced for thousands of years.
Daniel D. Palmer
#77. I have often wondered who was the first person to realize that eating an artichoke was a good idea.
Chris Cosentino
#78. There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.
Drake
#79. If somebody says 'singer-songwriter' to me, the first person I think of is James Taylor. There are plenty of modern singer-songwriters, but there is something about James Taylor that has always resonated with me.
Zachary Levi
#80. Even when people didn't think I was the real champion, I got called out anyway. So now when you get a good win the first person people think of is me. I guess they thought it would be easy, but nothing comes easy.
Danny Garcia
#81. Because that's what you do, you stand up for your best friend. And you eat lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he's the first person you think of.
Jerry Spinelli
#82. I was born with the Sight, Ink," she said, voice trembling. "So tell me, why were you the first person I'd ever seen from the Twixt?"
They stared at each other. His answer slipped through his lips.
"Because I saw you," he confessed. "And I couldn't look away.
Dawn Metcalf
#83. If I ever woke up with a dead hooker in my hotel room, Matt would be the first person I'd call.
Ben Affleck
#84. The first person who really showed me the ugly spirit was Brion Gysin. "The ugly spirit shot Joan because ... " and I never found out why. This Brion wrote out on a piece of paper in a sort of trance state.
Allen Ginsberg
#85. I have a policy that I don't actually watch the work that I do. There are all kinds of reasons to do that, but one really interesting side effect that has come about from that is that I have no imagery of the show that isn't from first-person.
Deborah Ann Woll
#86. I make mistakes and I move on. That's what I do, that's what I've always done. I leave, and other people leave. You're the first person in my whole life who stayed. And then you were taken away. But now you're here again ... and you're trying to leave me. That fucking hurts, too.
Jane Harvey-Berrick
#87. For me, that's always been one of the great charms of the first person: we gain access to a very personal, private kind of music.
Chang-rae Lee
#88. I never had a strategy about my life. I didn't have enough information to have a strategy. I'm the first person in my family to go to college. I had no family mentors.
Alan Dershowitz
#89. Skaz is a rather appealing Russian word (suggesting "jazz" and "scat", as in "scat-singing", to the English ear) used to designate a type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word.
David Lodge
#90. Walking the runway with Alexander McQueen, I really had to dig deep. You're with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. I was the first person out on the runway, but I thought, 'I have done the Olympics, I can do this.'
Aimee Mullins
#91. Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly and sincerly putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost; what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires.
Jack Kerouac
#92. You seem to think you're insignificant, but the truth is you're so intelligent, beautiful, kind and decent, adorable. I can't be the first person to have fallen in love with you, and I won't be the last. But I do believe I will love you the most.
Ai Mi
#93. Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
Brian Greene
#94. Harper Grayson had seen lots of people burn on TV, everyone had, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the playground behind the school. Schools
Joe Hill
#95. 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.
Zoe Whittall
#96. I'm not an impersonator. I've only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays.
Tom Bodett
#97. Since I write in first person and have no idea what goes on in men's heads.
Janet Evanovich
#98. I swear to God, I would marry the first person who asked me, just because it seems so completely impossible that anyone would ask.
Minnie Driver
#99. I wasn't allowed to watch MTV before school, but somehow I managed to, when I was five or six and Fiona Apple's video for "Criminal" came on. She was so odd and dark, and I immediately felt some kind of connection with her. She was also the first person I admired for their looks.
Sky Ferreira
#100. Sex scenes in books are always like first person, from this male perspective and just about how awesome he is. It feels like such a fantasy.
Joe Meno
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