Narrator Quotes - page 2

I don't mind a narrator who's self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see. (Sarah Pinborough)
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. View quote
Shaun Tan
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. View quote
W. G. Sebald
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. View quote
Chris Van Allsburg
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. View quote
Laurie Graham
The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape. View quote
Andrew Vachss
I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'. View quote
Alfonso Cuaron
The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses. View quote
Arthur Herzog
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. View quote
Rick Moody
I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him. View quote
S. E. Hinton
Choosing the narrator for a first-person story like 'Downriver' is a crucial decision because the voice has to be one the reader wants to listen to, and the voice has to be a match for the emotion you want the story to carry. (Will Hobbs)
I'm your narrator. It's my task to say Just where and how things happen in our play, Set the bare stage with words instead of props And keep on talking till the curtain drops. View quote
Stephen Vincent Benét
I'm your narrator. It's my task to say Just where and how things happen in our play, Set the bare stage with words instead of props And keep on talking till the curtain drops. ... It's an old task - old as the human heart, Old as those bygone players and their art Who, in old days when faith was nearer earth, Played out the mystery of Jesus' birth In hall or village green or market square For all who chose to come and see them there, And, if they knew that King Herod, in his crown, Was really Wat, the cobbler of the town, And Tom, the fool, played Abraham the Wise, They did not care. They saw with other eyes. The story was their own - not far away, As real as if it happened yesterday, Full of all awe and wonder yet so near, A marvelous thing that could have happened here In their own town - a star that could have blazed On their own shepherds, leaving them amazed, Frightened and questioning and following still To the bare stable - and the miracle. View quote
Stephen Vincent Benét
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. View quote
Edgar Rice Burroughs
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. View quote
David Attenborough
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. View quote
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. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Strong language in Larkin is put in not to shock the reader but to define the narrator's personality. When Larkin's narrator in 'A Study of Reading Habits' (in The Whitsun Weddings) said 'Books are a load of crap' there were critics - some of them, incredibly, among his more appreciative - who allowed themselves to believe that Larkin was expressing his own opinion. (Kingsley Amis had the same kind of trouble, perhaps from the same kind of people, when he let Jim Dixon cast aspersions on Mozart.) It should be obvious at long last, however, that the diction describes the speaker. View quote
Clive James
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. View quote
Al Pacino
Narrator: What's your relationship with the IRS these days? Karl Hess: [laughs] Miserable. Terrible. Narrator: And why's that? Karl Hess: Well, you know, they ask every now and then when I'm going to behave myself and I tell them never and I... Narrator: Are you not paying federal taxes? Karl Hess: Yeah, nothing. Narrator: I guess they don't take too kindly to that? Karl Hess: No, they think it's terrible. Therese Hess: On the other hand, they're not being very active about it right now. Karl Hess: Well, no, the last time he was here... Therese Hess: It's like it's no fun anymore or something. Karl Hess: Something like that. The local people seem to take more of a kindly view as though they really think it's a rotten thing. I'm not doing anybody any harm. And...they seem to be more sensitive. [laughs] Or decent somehow. I don't...I don't know, the federal people are... Narrator: What can they do? Karl Hess: Put me in jail. View quote
Karl Hess
I think these are some of the common themes [of my work]: a) life is hard, brutal, capricious and unfair, b) sometimes there is a benefit to seeing it clearly, and acknowledging it truthfully..., and c) other times it is best to find something to laugh about, lest despair crush one completely. I find a lot of humor in shocking or so-called taboo things: castration, excrement, violence (usually self-inflicted or inflicted on the narrator, "[Martin] Scorsese" being an exception), sex and sexual perversions... etc. (John S. Hall)
[as a Shakespearean narrator] Mind not my words - Let the play be the thing. I'll get back forth and touch myself anon. View quote
Robin Williams
Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself. View quote
James Lee Burke
[B]eing on the wrong side of history also served him a heaping plate of material for new work after 1945 when, in a trilogy of novels-D'un château l'autre (Castle to Castle, 1957), Nord (North, 1960), Rigodon (1961)-he chronicled a shattered world in ever more fragmented prose and honed his persecution complex via his increasingly deranged narrator. The writer who said he was only about style was in fact a revisionist historian, providing a rare and perversely instructive view of Vichy from the point of view of the defeated. His postwar novels are much more overtly political than the first two. They're also ventures into Holocaust denial: "Nuremberg," he wrote in D'un château l'autre, "needs redoing." View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Remember when the narrator is bullying the other girl? She says to her, "Just say ‘ow.' Just say anything, just make a sound.” I guess that's the first step: make a sound. I think for everybody that just being able to speak up is a bravery, which they have to learn. But for a writer, it's to be able to find a style and a rhythm and a structure to be able to tell a story. I think that is another way of finding voice, and it's not that easy.... View quote
Maxine Hong Kingston