Top 100 Quotes About Narrator
#1. And it occurred to me; I was not part of the action. Oh God, I thought, I'm not an anthropologist. I'm the lonely voice-over narrator of adolescence. The bitter, voice-over voice.
Joanna Pearson
#2. It's amazing when I do a gig how many people of different ages come up to me afterwards and chat to me about songs. The emotions I feel are what any person can relate to. Sometimes I'm just a narrator.
Ella Henderson
#3. Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.
Anne Lamott
#4. There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
Maria Semple
#5. In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn't stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he'd made them something else.
Joseph Heller
#6. This is what you learned in college," the narrator tells you early on. "A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.
Pam Munoz Ryan
#7. It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That's why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar.
David Attenborough
#8. I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.
Werner Herzog
#9. As a writer I'm not an explainer, really. I'm a narrator. I mistrust explanation.
D.T. Max
#10. In The Pale King, David Foster Wallace has his narrator remark that "it was a little bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter.
William Deresiewicz
#11. What the narrator comes to realize is that the past "cannot be described objectively" and that her present will always mediate her past.
Linda Hutcheon
#12. I have tried to be a generous narrator and care for my girl as best I can. I cannot help that readers will always insist on adventures ...
Catherynne M Valente
#13. 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.
Arthur Bradford
#14. I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'
Charles Palliser
#15. When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.
Henry James
#16. But I am a sly and wicked narrator. If there is a secret to be plumbed for your benefit, Dear Reader, I shall strap on a head-lamp and a pick-ax and have at it.
Catherynne M Valente
#17. A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
Umberto Eco
#18. (On George Eliot's narrative strategy)
It also forfeits the great game of the omniscient narrator, which is to know secrets which none of the characters involved will ever learn, ironically taking their unhappy ignorance to the grave.
Fredric Jameson
#19. I'm interested in getting deep into a person's consciousness and doing so in ways in which the narrator is secondary to the character's own thoughts.
Philipp Meyer
#20. My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.
Laurie Graham
#21. My friend Markus Zusak wrote a story from the point of view of death, 'The Book Thief.' I thought that's a great idea, where your omniscient narrator is death. I'm glad he had that idea because I wouldn't have been able to work so well with it.
Shaun Tan
#22. Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.
Molly Antopol
#23. I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
Philip Pullman
#24. Do you have any idea how hard a story is to write? My brain is jumpy, and my heart doesn't know where to live. Is Male is such an imperfect narrator, but he will try to finish his tale.
Jenny Hubbard
#25. When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.
Ben Lerner
#26. It is such a secret place, the land of tears. That is what the narrator ofThe Little Prince says after the little prince argues with him the first time about matters of consequence. And he was right. My land of tears had been a secret for a very long time.
Megan Hart
#27. The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man.
Pat Conroy
#28. I just respect audiences to understand that that's what goes on in movies. I just try to make movies that respect the intelligence of the audience. Respect that they understand that the narrator is always unreliable and respect that they understand that the medium can do whatever it wants.
Guy Maddin
#29. When someone walks in and you say "a six-foot-tall man," you miss the opportunity to describe what a six-foot-tall man would look like to your narrator, because how the narrator describes a six-foot-tall man says more about the narrator than about the man.
Chuck Palahniuk
#30. I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.
Rick Moody
#31. 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.
Ann Goldstein
#32. Writing in a journal activates the narrator function of our minds. Studies have suggested that simply writing down our account of a challenging experience can lower physiological reactivity and increase our sense of well-being, even if we never show what we've written to anyone else.
Daniel J. Siegel
#33. We see everything from the narrator's point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he's telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing.
Neal Stephenson
#34. If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don't stop. Don't try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it. narrator Charles Yu, not author Charles Yu p19
Charles Yu
#35. I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.
Andrea Seigel
#36. You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
Margaret Atwood
#37. At 10, I heard Neil Diamond's 'Solitary Man' and it moved me so deeply I stood, frozen in place during school recess, feeling such empathy for the narrator in Diamond's masterpiece that my heart was smashed.
Dan Hill
#38. Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul.
Gary Krist
#39. Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get.
Iain M. Banks
#40. A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering -
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#41. What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
Chris Bohjalian
#42. It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.
Akhil Sharma
#43. Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator's and even author's failures!
Dan Simmons
#44. I am voice actor Roger Craig Smith. You may know me as Batman, Captain America, Sonic the Hedgehog, Ezio from Assassin's Creed, Transformers: RID, or narrator of "Say Yes To the Dress" (among many other things). AMA!
Roger Craig Smith
#46. The narrator refers to a character as an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.
Pearl S. Buck
#47. Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.
Ann Beattie
#48. That's one problem about relating events in first person. The reader knows the narrator didn't get killed.
Robert McCammon
#49. Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.
Francis Parkman
#50. Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.
James Lee Burke
#51. My first job after my retirement from baseball was as a narrator for the Eastman Philharmonica.
Willie Stargell
#52. When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.
Paul Auster
#53. The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.
Chris Van Allsburg
#54. But there's also a strong emotional core to counterbalance the experimentalism, with some incredibly moving passages around the narrator's relationship with her (also female) German teacher. It's beautiful.
Deborah Smith
#55. In 'A Scandalous Woman,' the eventually distraught narrator watches as her high-spirited friend is beaten down - literally and figuratively - by Ireland's pious customs.
Alan Cheuse
#56. Hats off to Tavia Gilbert who made Bones alive for me. What a great writer and narrator team. You make listening fun!"
Tavia Gilbert
#57. I am a woman built on the wreckage of herself, Narrator
Chris Cleave
#58. When I was writing 'You Suck,' in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book's narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.
Christopher Moore
#59. Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.
Leni Zumas
#60. The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.
Pat Conroy
#61. September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.
Catherynne M Valente
#62. If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.
Margaret Atwood
#63. Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.
Al Pacino
#64. 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.
Norman Lock
#65. The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.
Charlotte Bronte
#66. The narrator, in a voice-of-God tenor, explains the experiment.
Eric Weiner
#67. Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.
William Kennedy
#68. Narrators can make or break your audiobook experience. Make sure your read first. always remember who's voice you can stand and try to stick to these people other wise your will end up hating the book. 50shades worst narrator ever. wined the whole book. enjoyed it much more in my head
Anonymous
#69. I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#70. The certainty that someone will never come back," the narrator muses of the dead, "never speak again, never take another step ... will never look at us or look away. I don't know how we bear it, or how we recover.
Javier Marias
#71. I wonder what it is about a certain novel that ticks the boxes for a reader. I mean, for me, a story can have the most fascinating plot in the world, but if the narrator's voice is dull, then the plot counts for nothing. For me, authorial charm is everything.
Victoria Connelly
#72. In writing, the connection between storyteller and audience is just as important. By using some subtle devices, a narrator can reach out to the reader and say, 'We're in this together.'
Constance Hale
#73. But music doesn't sum up my approach to literature - even in Vain Art of the Fugue. To 'fugue' I had to invent 'trap-words,' or words that would force the narrator to turn around and start his path anew.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#74. Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn't face each other, could intuit each other's presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence.
Ben Lerner
#75. It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#76. I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story.
Ron Carlson
#77. It's a challenge of to write a narrator who is doing something that is really unlikeable and morally questionable. A lot of times, you read a book because you like the character, you are cheering for the character; you want the best for the character.
Alissa Nutting
#78. And this is where I, the narrator, tell you that it's my story and I'll do as I please. You can close the book at any time, you know.
K.L. Montgomery
#79. When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
Sara Zarr
#80. 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
#81. I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won't want to lend yours out.
Arthur Golden
#82. In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be.
John McTiernan
#84. I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.
Bret Easton Ellis
#85. The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.
Andrew Vachss
#86. I always have to remember that I am the narrator, but it doesn't have to be about me. A lot of songwriting is about trying to use what part of me is valid in telling the story. I don't want to overcook it, you know? Sometimes it seems that's really where the work is.
Ryan Adams
#87. The only difference between the narrator of contemporary affairs and the ordinary historian is that moral judgments about the present provoke fiercer reactions and have more immediately practical implications than moral judgments about the past.
Geoffrey Barraclough
#88. Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, "I knew girls who saved his gum."
Amy Hempel
#89. And it [Fight Club novel] was written so general that my father thought I was writing about his father, and my boss thought I was writing about his boss. People really put themselves, you know, in the shoes of the narrator.
Chuck Palahniuk
#90. The objectivity of the narrator is a modern invention, we need only reflect that our Lord God didn't want it in his book.
Jose Saramago
#91. She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.
Anna Godbersen
#92. 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
#93. I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.
S.E. Hinton
#94. 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.
Garth Stein
#95. The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.
Annalee Newitz
#96. The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses.
Arthur Herzog
#97. A vivid portrait of a teenage girl and her family in disarray. Meredith is a wonderful narrator, witty, feisty, full of yearning, and the story she tells is as complicated as life itself. This is a richly satisfying novel.
Margot Livesey
#98. Blacker than the night, the wedge penetrated the darkness. An F 117 raced by, the roar from its engines screaming through the interior of the chopper, and then it sliced away a piece of sky and disappeared into the void.
-Narrator, Truth Insurrected: The Saint Mary Project
Daniel P. Douglas
#99. she constantly shifts back and forth between her "literate" narrator's voice and a highly idiomatic black voice
Zora Neale Hurston
#100. And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation,
Ben Lerner
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