Your Narrator Quotes

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

Markus Zusak

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.

I am a crazy woman... That last part is true.

Brunonia Barry

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. If you're looking for a story about nice people doing nice things, this isn't for you. You will be burdened with an unreliable narrator who will disappoint and repel you at every turn.
Still with me?
Too bad for you.
I can't wait to break your heart.

Christopher Buehlman

#26. ... Man's heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink. - The Narrator.

Nikos Kazantzakis

#27. I think I knew even then it would be my maps that would take me across the world, to places and people unknown and into cultures otherwise closed to me. In mapping them I would come to know them a little and at times my very eagerness pained me.

Julie Haydon

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. But I was not good enough. You should understand this about me - I am not a hero; not one to tap unknown reserves of courage; not one to rise to circumstance. I am the understudy who chokes on his lines when he is forced onto the stage. I am never, ever good enough.

Dexter Palmer

#31. I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Anne Lamott

#33. I could tell the officer all of this because it was the truth. All of this happened in the house at some stage. Should it matter when it happened?

Sarah Schmidt

#34. There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

Maria Semple

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

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

D.T. Max

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

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

Charles Palliser

#46. Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.

Dexter Palmer

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. (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