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I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!" - The Narrator." -- Nikos Kazantzakis
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. -- Chuck Palahniuk
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
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
I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective. -- Anthony Bourdain
I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him. -- S. E. Hinton
Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself. -- James Lee Burke
The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses. -- Arthur Herzog
The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape. -- Andrew Vachss
There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator. -- Maria Semple
I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.' -- Charles Palliser
There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people. -- Pat Conroy
The narrator of a documentary often comes in at the last minute and takes some of the glory they don't deserve. -- Joel Edgerton
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. -- Manuel Puig
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
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
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
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
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
There has always been this narrator in me - I loved ideas, and part of the great love affair I would have with ideas consisted of talking about them. -- Jason Silva
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
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
By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes. -- Caroline Knapp
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
I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller. -- W. G. Sebald
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
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
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
I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain? -- Anne Enright
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
Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator. -- Phillip Lopate
I used to be a narrator for bad mimes. -- Steven Wright
Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story. -- William Kennedy
***A Last note from your narrator*** I am haunted by humans. -- Markus Zusak
The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator. -- Charlotte Bronte
In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be. -- John McTiernan
It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator. -- Mario Vargas Llosa
As a writer I'm not an explainer, really. I'm a narrator. I mistrust explanation. -- D. T. Max
Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better. -- Ethan Canin
My first job after my retirement from baseball was as a narrator for the Eastman Philharmonica. -- Willie Stargell
I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to unreliable. -- Charles Palliser
I wanted to do a collection where the narrator is constant throughout, so that there's a little unity. -- Arthur Bradford
I can't reasonably pretend to be a transparent and omniscient narrator who brings no personal perspective. That person doesn't exist. -- Molly Crabapple
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
Simply adored Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope: the voice of Essie, the narrator, is terrific & the last line blew me away. -- Nancy Pearl
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
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
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
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
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. -- Baruch Spinoza
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 MuÃ±oz Ryan
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
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. -- Elizabeth Gilbert
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. -- Truman Capote
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
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
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
I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator. -- Laurie Graham
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
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. -- Rob Roberge
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
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
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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
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
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

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