Narrators Quotes

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

— William Kennedy

I see people sometimes who remind me of my narrators.

— Lydia Davis

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

The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.

— Charlotte Bronte

I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

— Anthony Bourdain

I used to be a narrator for bad mimes.

— Steven Wright

We are unreliable narrators - all of us.

— Ruth Ware

One naturally identifies to some extent with an "I" female narrator going through something that you recognize whether you've gone through it…

— Ann Goldstein

My biggest lesson ... was to try and create narrators that were believable. ...so the listener becomes really invested in the story…

— Kristian Bush

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.

— James Lee Burke

My narrators tend to be women with low self-esteem, so I can send them to charm school.

— Elinor Lipman

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

— D. T. Max

Simply adored Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope: the voice of Essie, the narrator, is terrific & the last line blew…

— Nancy Pearl

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

— Charles Palliser

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…

— Manuel Puig

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong…

— Anna Godbersen

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of…

— Ben Lerner

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going to the…

— Chris Van Allsburg

I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there…

— Louise Erdrich

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit…

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

Using a dog as a narrator has limitations and it has advantages. The limitations are that a dog cannot speak. A dog…

— Garth Stein

I have no policy, for or against: only a personal style. Which is to say, I use them when I think it's…

— Charles Stross

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed,…

— Eyvind Johnson

I learned capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media…

— Jeanette Winterson

“The underlying and more ominous question is whether the story of our species — the greater human narrative — has simply become…

— Steve Almond

Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the…

— Neal Stephenson

Kerouac's books portray a hero and narrator free and easy, confident, sure of his rebellion against the American system. In reality, Jack…

— Gerald Nicosia

To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the…

— Lynn Emanuel

The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a…

— Janet Malcolm

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to…

— Milan Kundera

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling…

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

— Phillip Lopate

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have…

— Thomas Keneally

I write unreliable narrators because - paradoxically - they're the most honest, true-to-life kind there is.

— Ruth Ware

My first job after my retirement from baseball was as a narrator for the Eastman Philharmonica.

— Willie Stargell

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 think narrators expect a high level of intimacy with their readers, and vice versa.

— Tom Barbash

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

— Anne Rice