Narrator Quotes

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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
Ann Beattie
A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations. View quote
Umberto Eco
Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes. View quote
Francis Parkman
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? View quote
Anne Enright
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. View quote
Garth Stein
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. View quote
Caroline Knapp
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. View quote
Laurie Graham
I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.' View quote
Charles Palliser
In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be. (John McTiernan)
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. View quote
Sara Zarr
My first job after my retirement from baseball was as a narrator for the Eastman Philharmonica. View quote
Willie Stargell
In Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, the narrator attempts to describe a Whooping Crane in 25 words or less. One attempt at the description reads Imagine Wilt Chamberlain in a red yarmulke and snowy feathers... The narrator cuts off the attempt with the explanation You're assuming that the reader knows who Wilt Chamberlain is. Many people don't follow basketball and wouldn't understand that Wilt signifies size and strength and arrogance made palatable by grace. View quote
Wilt Chamberlain
They saw themselves, you could see, as real grown-up devotchkas already, what with the old hipswing when they saw your Faithful Narrator, brothers, and padded groodies and red all ploshed on their goobers.... They viddied themselves as real sophistoes.... They had the same ideas or lack of, and the same colour hair - a like dyed strawy. Well, they would grow up real today.... No school this afterlunch, but education certain, Alex as teacher. View quote
Anthony Burgess
There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa all welcoming and greeting like loving....I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the room next to this room where the fire was burning away and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted....For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son....I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up. View quote
Anthony Burgess
I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion's leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night – as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here's Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. View quote
Chuck Palahniuk
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. View quote
Iain Banks
Let your love flow out on all living things. These words at some level have the quality of a strapping homily. Nonetheless, they are remarkably beautiful, strung together in their honest lump-like English syllables... Let your love flow out on all living things. But there are a couple of problems with this precept of mine. The first is, of course, that it is not mine. It springs from the universe and is the property of God, and the words have been intercepted - on the wing, so to speak - by such mediators as Lao-tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and thousands upon thousands of lesser prophets, including your narrator, who heard the terrible truth of their drumming somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington and set them down with the fury of a madman sculpting in stone. View quote
William Styron
History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one-their accuracy and authenticity-is a function of the reliability of the narrator. View quote
Charles Stross
Troy: Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such educational films as Lead Paint: Delicious but Deadly and Here Comes the Metric System!. Today I will be your narrator in this sex-ed film called Fuzzy Bunny's Guide to You-Know-What. (Phil Hartman)
I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective. View quote
Anthony Bourdain
The preface is usually that part of a book which can most safely be omitted. It usually represents that efflorescent manifestation of egotism which an author, after working hard, cannot spare either himself or his readers. More often than not the readers spare themselves. When, however, the writer is a daily perpetrator of high treason, his introductory remarks may command from the English public that kind of awful veneration with which £5000 confessions are perused in the Sunday newspapers, quite frequently after the narrator has taken his last leap in the dark. View quote
William Joyce
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. View quote
Rachel Kushner
The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective. View quote
Sarah Pinborough