Quotes & Sayings About Narrator

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. — Norman Lock

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body. — Ben Lerner

Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me. — Dexter Palmer

There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a single 'reliable' narrator, I often wonder, is this the whole story? What could be missing here? — Susan Barker

she constantly shifts back and forth between her "literate" narrator's voice and a highly idiomatic black voice — Zora Neale Hurston

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. — Eliza Doolittle

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. — Ella Henderson

There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator. — Maria Semple

Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get. — Iain M. Banks

Blacker than the night, the wedge penetrated the darkness. An F 117 raced by, the roar from its engines screaming through the interior of the chopper, and then it sliced away a piece of sky and disappeared into the void.
-Narrator, Truth Insurrected: The Saint Mary Project — Daniel P. Douglas

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator. — Peter Watts

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. — Geoffrey Barraclough

Ten minutes after loading up her plate, when Iris is sipping pale apple juice, she asks Els across the table, "I'm told I should make myself useful. What are my options?"
Els spears a strawberry. "What can you do?"
"I organize."
"Like your sister."
"I organize people, events," Iris says. "Denise organizes information."
I absorb that. I never thought of myself as organizing anything. I think of myself as listening, coping, avoiding. The words feel good, rolled over in my mind: Denise organizes information. — Corinne Duyvis

The objectivity of the narrator is a modern invention, we need only reflect that our Lord God didn't want it in his book. — Jose Saramago

In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn't stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he'd made them something else. — Joseph Heller

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. — Colin Farrell

Nostalgia for people, cultures, everything. There's an ability to use these marks to note things that are erased, deleted. Traces are a species of history, of evidence. It's a way for the way the narrator to construct a semblance of self, even though all of this creates a deception, a way to think of one's traces as a real way to define oneself. The trace is fallible, impermanent. It's one of the motives I had in mind throughout the text. — Sergio Chejfec

How confusing. Could it be that our narrator is unreliable? No such chance. Mind like a steel trap, I have. — Daniel Handler

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so. — Eyvind Johnson

I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won't want to lend yours out. — Arthur Golden

... there are simply no words that would be worthy of describing their encounter. And if any narrator ever tries to come up with some details, it would be only to arouse the readers' lust, and would not do justice to what happened that night between Nini and the young woman whose dream he invaded. It was just a glorious experience of two bodies melting in one, two souls uniting in one, two hearts beating with the same beat, and two spirits becoming one. Yes, it was a dream. — Stevan V. Nikolic

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. — David Attenborough

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. — Sophie Hannah

And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, — Ben Lerner

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

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. — Annalee Newitz

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending. — Dorothy Allison

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. — Molly Antopol

When I got home, I seemed in a dream. My windows looked upon hers; I remained all the day looking at them, and all the day they were closed and dark. I forgot everything for this woman; I slept not, I eat nothing. That evening I fell into a fever, the next morning I was delirious, and the next evening I was DEAD!'
'Dead!' cried his hearers.
'Dead!' answered the narrator, with a conviction in his voice which words alone cannot give; 'dead as Fabian, the
cast of whose dead face hangs from that wall!'
'Go on,' whispered the others, holding their breath.
The hail still rattled against the windows, and the fire had so nearly died out, that they threw more wood on the feeble flame which penetrated the darkness of the studio and cast a faint light upon the pale face of him who told the story. (The Dead Man's Story — James Hain Friswell

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire. — Anna Godbersen

In Eudora Welty's masterful story "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941), the narrator is engaged in a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, who has come home after leaving under suspicious if not actually disgraceful circumstances. The narrator, Sister, is outraged at having to cook two chickens to feed five people and a small child just because her "spoiled" sister has come home. What Sister can't see, but we can, is that those two fowl are really a fatted calf. It may not be a grand feast by traditional standards, but it is a feast, as called for upon the return of the Prodigal Son, even if the son turns out to be a daughter. Like the brothers in the parable, Sister is irritated and envious that the child who left, and ostensibly used up her "share" of familial goodwill, is instantly welcomed, her sins so quickly forgiven. Then — Thomas C. Foster

although we move forward through a story, the entire story is already complete - we hold it in our hands. In this sense, fiction, the great life-giver, also kills, not just because people often die in novels and stories but, more important, because, even if they don't die, they have already happened. Fictional form is always a kind of death, in the way that Blanchot described actual life. "Was. We say he is, then suddenly he was, this terrible was." That is the narrator of Thomas Bernhard's novel "The Loser," describing his friend Wertheimer, who has committed suicide. But it might also describe the tense in which we encounter most fictional lives: we say, "She was," not "She is." He left the house, she rubbed her neck, she put down her book and went to sleep. — James Wood

As sneakily addictive as a game of Pong (which was named, we're told, after the narrator's dad), this zany zip-line of a novel takes the piss out of the Asian-American 'good immigrant' story. Full of charming antiheroes making comically bad choices, the story dazzles us with its absurdity, which makes its eventual wisdom--about lineage, ethnicity, and the meaning of family--all the more wonderfully surprising. — Michael Lowenthal

But the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worse side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. — Albert Camus

I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember. — Virginia Woolf

At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. (spoken by narrator Ava Bigtree in Swamplandia!) — Karen Russell

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises. — Umberto Eco

I mean: if you're going outside to look for your sister, I get it." Max goes silent. Maybe Mirjam's death is hitting him now, maybe his voice will choke - but he goes on. "But if you're going outside to help your mother . . ." He gestures helplessly at my injured arm. His fingers stop a centimeter away, hovering in midair. "Don't risk it. Don't risk you."
"She's my mother."
"The captain will never let her on if she doesn't even try. Not when there are so many people who haven't had thechance to try. People we can use on the ship. People who have been on that waiting list forever."
There are a dozen things I want to say. But she's mymother - as though that means as much as people pretend it does.
She is trying, just in a different way - as though I'm convincing myself.
I wasn't on that waiting list, either.
I might not be someone the ship can use, as much as I'm trying to be. — Corinne Duyvis

To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the narrator, to desire itself, or to lack? This is a work of complexly, ambiguously layered narratives and identities. The opening poem asserts I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories. These lines become an ars poetica for the whole of this painful and exceptional collection in which the unspeakable is stubbornly confronted by a searing eloquence. This is a commanding debut. — Lynn Emanuel

When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement. — Henry James

What's precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there's a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it rarely seems to exist for just its own sake. It's almost always deployed to make some point (Vollmann's the most editorial young novelist going right now, and he's great at using formal ingenuity to make the editorializing a component of his narrative instead of an interruption) or to create an effect that's internal to the text. His narrator's always weirdly effaced, the writing unself-conscious, despite all the "By-the-way-Dear-reader" intrusions. In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's rare — David Foster Wallace

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. — Dumitru Tepeneag

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 used to be a narrator for bad mimes. — Steven Wright

I learned capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media is so bad at because it's so boring - nothing's happening. In a book, you can be inside the narrator's head for 50 pages, and nothing needs to happen. Then you learn to be inside your own head without something needing to happen. It's a very good antidote to a crazy, restless, "what's next?" culture - that you can just be in your own head and nothing is happening except that this is a rich place. I love that. — Jeanette Winterson

Narrators can make or break your audiobook experience. Make sure your read first. always remember who's voice you can stand and try to stick to these people other wise your will end up hating the book. 50shades worst narrator ever. wined the whole book. enjoyed it much more in my head — Anonymous

In Wright Morris's novel Plains Song, the narrator asks, "Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?" The question is always open. How we treat our world and each other grows from our vision of how we have come to where we are. Ultimately, of course, the issue is not survival but decency and common sense. Everything passes, the psalmist reminds us. No one escapes. The best we can hope is to learn a little from the speaking dead, to find in our deep past some help in acting wisely in the teeth of life. — Elliott West

I believe I essentially remain what I have always been--a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose. In this mood I don't dare go anywhere near the shortstory form. It eats up little fat undetatched writers like me. — J.D. Salinger

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died' - if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator. — Amy Bloom

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

I wonder what it is about a certain novel that ticks the boxes for a reader. I mean, for me, a story can have the most fascinating plot in the world, but if the narrator's voice is dull, then the plot counts for nothing. For me, authorial charm is everything. — Victoria Connelly

We'll be busy tonight." He isn't wrong. Practically every woman in town makes a showing at Tucker's after a Jake sighting. I feel like I am watching the National Geographic Channel on mating rituals in the wild. I can hear the narrator in my head. The female approaches, the sway of her hips a sign of her willingness to reproduce. Obviously in heat, her open blouse exposes her unnaturally large . . . "Hey, — L.A. Fiore

Once I got interested in organized crime, and, specifically, Jewish organized crime, I got very interested in it. I have learned that, like my narrator Hannah, I'm a crime writer in my own peculiar way. Crime with a capital "C" is the subject that I'm stuck with - even Sway is about "crime" in a certain way. The nice thing about crime is that it enables you to deal with some big questioO — Zachary Lazar

You can do everything differently in a novel. Hero narrates the novel; we're in his head. You're hearing all his thought processes and you're hearing him call himself out on his bad behavior. You don't have the benefit of that narrator in a movie. What you see a character do, very often, becomes that much more important because you don't have him editorializing it for you. — Jonathan Tropper

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. — Shaun Tan

There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It's funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don't want a baby? Don't have one. I don't want to get married? I won't. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don't apologize. Don't explain. Don't ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it. — Shonda Rhimes

In his Preface to the 1892 edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles Hardy warns the reader that 'a novel is an impression, not an argument'. However, the text offers several explanations of Tess's tragedy; social, psychological, hereditary, and fatalistic, all of which proceed from the assumption that Hardy's text is in some sense determined, and that the character of Tess is somehow knowable. Indeed, the tragedy of Tess is in this sense overdetermined. But it should be remembered that the character of Tess is constructed in the text from many points of observation, including that of the ambivalent narrator; constructed that is from impressions. — Geoffrey Harvey

My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.

I am a crazy woman... That last part is true. — Brunonia Barry

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). — Philip Kitcher

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. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

This is what you learned in college," the narrator tells you early on. "A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring. — Pam Munoz Ryan

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

If you're looking for a story about nice people doing nice things, this isn't for you. You will be burdened with an unreliable narrator who will disappoint and repel you at every turn.
Still with me?
Too bad for you.
I can't wait to break your heart. — Christopher Buehlman

(On George Eliot's narrative strategy)
It also forfeits the great game of the omniscient narrator, which is to know secrets which none of the characters involved will ever learn, ironically taking their unhappy ignorance to the grave. — Fredric Jameson

In Gilead, the narrator's friend's son describes himself not as an atheist but in "state of categorical unbelief." He says, "I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean." I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views
I just didn't think about religion. — Will Schwalbe

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man. — Pat Conroy

Thus we come to the problem of determining what the poem is 'about.' Charles Altieri notes that '[a]n expression of the self can be one that is intended, the self's act, or one that is symptomatic, the act of a self not in control of what it manifests'(24) In 'Yankee Doodle,' and to a lesser extent in '$$$$$$," the interesting aspects of the poem are not 'the intended expression of the self.' The lack of explicitness is not suggestive in any positive sense because we feel that were things to be spelled out, this would weaken, not strengthen, the narrator's case by revealing the unacknowledged irrationality at the root of it. — Russell Harrison

I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn't I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Chris Van Allsburg

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. — Geraldine Brooks

I didn't set out to write a book with no real male characters, but men were not important to my narrator, who was much more interested in maternal and pseudo-maternal love, so they were unimportant to me. I didn't even notice the lack of men in the story until I finished it. But once I did notice it, I was kind of delighted. Apparently, my subconscious is totally sexist. — Janice Erlbaum

As a writer I'm not an explainer, really. I'm a narrator. I mistrust explanation. — D.T. Max

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. — Margaret Atwood

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life. — Milan Kundera

The narrator refers to a character as an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them. — Pearl S. Buck

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

The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator. — Charlotte Bronte

A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator. — Romesh Gunesekera

The truth is, I hate not being the first person narrator all the way through! To paraphrase David Copperfield, I don't know whether I'm the hero or the victim of this tale. But either way, shouldn't I dominate it? — Anne Rice

Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, "I knew girls who saved his gum." — Amy Hempel

A vivid portrait of a teenage girl and her family in disarray. Meredith is a wonderful narrator, witty, feisty, full of yearning, and the story she tells is as complicated as life itself. This is a richly satisfying novel. — Margot Livesey

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer. — Paul Auster

It seems strange and inaccurate, when writing of what oneself once was, to speak of oneself as 'I,' especially when I find it difficult to own up to some of the actions performed by the people I once was . . . the only way to make sense of our existences is to set the stories of our lives down on paper, to try to make one tale that shows how the twentieth century turned Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into me. — Dexter Palmer

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs. — Billy Collins

The reason why the book begins with the wish to "play back" how the two met is precisely to see if repeating the scenario might tell the narrator why he is so thoroughly smitten, to play with the scenario all over again, perhaps to master it, as Freud says about repetition. But there cannot be a "reason." An attraction that needs a reason is not a reason the heart or the body cares much about. — Andre Aciman

It's a challenge of to write a narrator who is doing something that is really unlikeable and morally questionable. A lot of times, you read a book because you like the character, you are cheering for the character; you want the best for the character. — Alissa Nutting

Charlus takes the narrator's chin and slides his magnetized fingers up to the ears "like a barber's fingers." This trivial gesture, which I begin, is continued by another part of myself; without anything interrupting it physically, it branches off, shifts from a simple function to a dazzling meaning, that of the demand for love. Meaning (destiny) electrifies my hand: I am about to tear open the other's opaque body, oblige the other (whether there is a response, a withdrawal, or mere acceptance) to enter into the interplay of meaning: I am about to make the other speak. In the lover's realm, there is no acting out: no propulsion, perhaps even no pleasure
nothing but signs, a frenzied activity of language: to institute, on each furtive occasion, the system (the paradigm) of demand and response. — Roland Barthes

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. — Laurie Graham

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. — Leni Zumas

Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul. — Gary Krist

Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous horse-laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gaspings and shriekings and suffocatings. — Mark Twain

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. — Francis Parkman

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

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her. — Olivia Sudjic

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that. — Rob Roberge

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. — Rick Moody

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

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