Narrators quotes:

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  • 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
  • In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be. -- John McTiernan
  • 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 third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape. -- Andrew Vachss
  • My first job after my retirement from baseball was as a narrator for the Eastman Philharmonica. -- Willie Stargell
  • First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success. -- Anne Rice
  • 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
  • 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 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
  • 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
  • A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so. -- Eyvind Johnson
  • The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in extraordinary shape-shifting prose that makes this not just an important novel, but a remarkable read. -- Aminatta Forna
  • I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale. -- Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs. -- Billy Collins
  • We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater. -- Anne Lamott
  • Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making. -- Clive Barker
  • These types of films that are psychologically sort of dark at times, I find extremely exciting to do because there's always something to think about. There's nothing more boring than to show up on set and say a line and know that your character means exactly what they say. It's interesting to have an unreliable narrator in a film and that's what both of those films have been. -- Leonardo DiCaprio
  • I think narrators expect a high level of intimacy with their readers, and vice versa. -- Tom Barbash
  • My narrators tend to be women with low self-esteem, so I can send them to charm school. -- Elinor Lipman
  • First-person narrators can't die, so as long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha. -- Pat Barker
  • One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them. -- Hanya Yanagihara
  • My biggest lesson ... was to try and create narrators that were believable. ...so the listener becomes really invested in the story or the song. -- Kristian Bush
  • I don't normally make documentaries. I'm a drama director. I've made a few short docs, but I don't like talking heads or 'voice of God' narrators. -- Asif Kapadia
  • 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. -- Thomas Keneally
  • My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves. -- Chuck Palahniuk
  • 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
  • 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. -- Simon Schama
  • For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing. -- John Darnielle
  • 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. -- Anne Enright
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