Top 45 Narrator Quotes

Even criticism is more interesting when the writer’s authority does not only come through this omniscient narrator, but through questions, ambivalence, vulnerability. A mind questioning and on the move, not just settling down and declaring – that’s one of the most interesting possibilities.

The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character’s head any time he chooses.

In ‘Sweet Days of Discipline,’ the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frederique at a movie theatre. Frederique invites her home.

There’s always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

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.

Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrongheaded. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed into.

‘Yeh Hai Aashiqui – Siyappa Ishq Ka’ has become a part of who I am. I will be narrating the stories, and as a narrator, I get to experience each story up close and personal and go through the same range of emotions as the characters.

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.

‘Homer and Langley’ is the work of E. L. Doctorow’s old age. There are fewer Homeric references than you might have expected, given that the narrator is called Homer Collyer and is blind, although, like the classical Homer, not born blind.

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.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me – it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I’m working on a story, I’m constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I’m in.

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

Try as I might, Agatha Christie is unique. The actual writing style can’t be exactly the same, so instead of trying to replicate it exactly, the way I got around it was by inventing a new narrator.

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

What is most important to me is that my narrator’s voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.

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.

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.

I think Jughead is a pretty trustworthy character – not only a narrator. I think he might be selfish, but he’s obviously selfish, and that is comforting to me. I also think he has a really strong moral fiber and a propensity for good, and he tries to cultivate that in other people.

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.

The novel ‘World War Z’ is told from the perspectives of so many people – speaking to the narrator – that there’s no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.

In ‘The Third Hotel,’ my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She’s trying to make sense of her husband’s death, how someone’s life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.

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.

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.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

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?

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it’s the only approach that makes sense to me.

Never trust a narrator whose opening gambit is to insist he’s not mad.

When I was writing ‘You Suck,’ in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book’s narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.

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.

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

Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there’s a connection between you and the narrator.

‘Pi’ was one of my favorite films growing up because I thought it employed paranoia and voice-over, and also because it used this unreliable narrator in a very fascinating way.

I played Joseph in ‘Joseph & The Technicolor Dreamcoat,’ which was a bit silly because I am a girl. I wanted to be the narrator, but I had fun with it anyway.

There has always been this narrator in me – I loved ideas, and part of the great love affair I would have with ideas consisted of talking about them.

‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ is an amphibious book in which what appears to be a personal essay about Flaubertian writing is gradually, delicately transformed into an extremely sad novel in which the differences between character, author, and narrator are less clear than they appear at first glance.

If somebody from the past doesn’t rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven’t got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act – and that starts the plot in motion.

I prefer to be a director and a narrator rather than a writer.

In ‘A Scandalous Woman,’ the eventually distraught narrator watches as her high-spirited friend is beaten down – literally and figuratively – by Ireland’s pious customs.

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

There’s something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

It’s amazing when I do a gig how many people of different ages come up to me afterwards and chat to me about songs. The emotions I feel are what any person can relate to. Sometimes I’m just a narrator.

So much about Trump is… mysterious and slippery. Everything in his business record, you had to ask him for the details. He made himself the only source. He would either not tell you, or he was often an unreliable narrator about his own life.

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.

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.

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.