Narrator Quotes

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Memory is a traitor, and a liar, and a good-for-nothing thief.”
― Jay Kristoff, Godsgrave

“All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth -- yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes it nearly impossible to handle. It is such a great responsibility that it's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world.”
― Vera Nazarian, Dreams Of The Compass Rose

“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.

When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“It might be most dramatically effective to begin the tale at the moment when Arnold Baffin rang me up and said, "Bradley, could you come round here please, I think I have just killed my wife.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Then the front doorbell (already too long delayed by my rambling narrative) rang.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“For you [muses] are divine, and you have the gifts of memory and story; but only the faintest echo of the great tale has come down to me”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“So let's just forget about the whole thing and agree never to speak of it again. And I promise I'll never lie to you again.

Ah, but surely you must be saying, "Hey! Isn't this entire story a work of fiction and therefore one big lie?"

Perhaps. But we already agreed never to speak of it again.”
― Jason Carter Eaton, The Facttracker

“Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud...”

"...When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head?"

"It's certainly not my own", said Harj, and the others chimed in with the same claim.

"Then whose it?”
― Douglas Coupland

“I have been on the whole a lucky man. And I would say that even now. Perhaps especially I would say it now.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“There are indeed many places where I could start. I might start with Rachel's tears, or Priscilla's. There is much shedding of tears in this story. In a complex explanation any order may seem arbitrary. Where after all does anything begin? That three of the four starting points I have mentioned were causally independent of each other suggests speculations, doubtless of the most irrational kind, upon the mystery of human fate.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“For the moment however behold me sitting with Priscilla and Francis. A domestic interior. It is about ten o'clock in the evening and the curtains are drawn.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I’d normally spare you the details, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of writing a story.”
― J.S. Mason, The Stork Ate My Brother...And Other Totally Believable Stories

“The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“But now I became fascinated by the chasm between who this person had been as Mary Claire Griffith at fifteen and who she'd become as Cleo Ray at twenty-five.”
― L.R. Dorn, The Anatomy of Desire

“The memory of August Bennett lived on as a drive for the revolution. He lived in the spirits of rebels who fought side by side since the beginning, in the mind of his parents, and in the heart of Maria.”
― Kaylie Fowler

“In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired. Not being old enough to invent, I content myself with narrating, and I beg the reader to assure himself of the truth of a story in which all the characters, with the exception of the heroine, are still alive.”
― Alexandre Dumas fils, La dame aux camélias

“The preoccupations of the narrative reveal the preoccupations of the narrator.”
― Sean Norris

“As if the only choice they have left is how they're going to die, and they want to die in a fight.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“She wants what she wants," Kath says.

Don't we all?”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“If I describe him to you in terms of hair, eye color, shape of face, the effect will be all wrong, because he was the living, breathing incarnation of my deepest desires, not yours. You must imagine your own naked man, and I will tell you only this: he was larger than I would have expected, more fully embodied, and that is only half a dirty joke. There was no prettiness about him, and nothing effeminate. Nothing angelic, either, so if that's what you had started to picture, start again.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“What I learned on this ritualized quest seeking deep understanding of the purpose of being by communing with a guiding tutelary spirit is virtually indefinable. I did not discover how to escape sorrowfulness, atone for all my prior sins, nor will I live a guiltless future. The more that I churned to produce a rotogravure defining the notched contours of my inner mesh the more determinedly the elided output of the intaglio cylinders erased my attenuated flux. Finishing this scroll, I shall eradicate the perpetually vexed narrator. Torrents of words erase a former saturated self in the sieve of blacken personal exhaustion brought about by mulling the intransigent facts engulfing a self-absorbed existence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The essay becomes an exercise in the meaning and value of watching a writer conquer their own sense of threat to deliver themself of their wisdom.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“A writer’s voice is the distinct fashion peculiar to a writer in which he pieces together words.”
― Adewale Joel, Learn Creative Writing: A guide to writing perfect drafts

“Voiceover Actress looking to work with independent authors at a low rate in order to build up my portfolio. E-mail me at: vo_darlene_@outlook.com to get in touch.

Have a wonderful say.”
― Darlene

“Perhaps it is no overstatement to say, therefore, that Moby Dick’s main character is, not Ahab; nor the albino sperm whale; nor Nature, or the ocean; but rather the very ability to conscientiously tell a story well.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, The underrated narrator: The important role Ishmael plays in Moby Dick

“And [Moby Dick's narrator] is so very smart, so very smart indeed, and so gifted with words, so very gifted, that at the right time he'll make you forget his presence, just to signal, at a certain point, that he was there all the time: and that he is actually you, a narrator to the troubled but no less amusing, and beautiful, human existence.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, The underrated narrator: The important role Ishmael plays in Moby Dick

“I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing and without hesitation he said, 'Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.' I think he's right. If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn't really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time... Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal... By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, an in all honesty you'd rather stay home and watch the aspic set.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird