Narrators Quotes

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

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.

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

For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.

I just respect audiences to understand that that's what goes on in movies. I just try to make movies that respect the intelligence of the audience. Respect that they understand that the narrator is always unreliable and respect that they understand that the medium can do whatever it wants.

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.

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'.

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

In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be.

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.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

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.

Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.

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

Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.

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.

I can't reasonably pretend to be a transparent and omniscient narrator who brings no personal perspective. That person doesn't exist.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

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.

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

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

I am voice actor Roger Craig Smith. You may know me as Batman, Captain America, Sonic the Hedgehog, Ezio from Assassin's Creed, Transformers: RID, or narrator of “Say Yes To the Dress” (among many other things). AMA!

I personally just want to do as many different things as I can do, whether it's comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, narrator... You've got a documentary, I've got a voice. Animated films. Big films, small films.

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.

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

So a lot of what you see in the Baroque Cycle is me wanting to be one of those guys. In the case of Anathem, I needed something that was more formal, less flashy, as if it had been translated from the classical language of another planet, but enlivened with slang terms that a teenage narrator would enjoy throwing around.

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

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

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."

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

We see everything from the narrator's point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he's telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing.

Consider the different narrative styles within the story, and the glee with which the "moralistic narrator" celebrates Aschenbach's fall - maybe, then, this is a hostile verdict and the international fame is warranted after all (given that Mann modeled his protagonist so closely on himself, it would be quite odd if he had intended Aschenbach's literary inferiority to be a fixed part of the interpretation).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I used to be a narrator for bad mimes.

***A Last note from your narrator*** I am haunted by humans.

But music doesn't sum up my approach to literature - even in Vain Art of the Fugue. To 'fugue' I had to invent 'trap-words,' or words that would force the narrator to turn around and start his path anew.

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.

Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

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.

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.

September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.

Very often, or perhaps more often, and even in very good collections - even in some of the best collections ever written, I would argue - it's because our "voicier" writers hew so closely to one given set of dictional tics that we as readers can't read the books all the way through in a single sitting, because if we did, the stories and their narrators would all start to bleed together.

I don't know if you've ever seen this film called Elite Squad, which, actually Wagner [Moura] is the one narrating that. José Padilha, one of creators of our show, that's where the style comes from. It has a heavy narrator. But I thought about it a lot. You [the viewers] have to work for the show, unless you're bilingual. It's a really aggressive type of filming, it's engaging, you've got to read.

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.