Narrators Quotations

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

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

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 go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.

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

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

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

The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a 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.

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

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

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

In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.

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.

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.

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

I used to be a narrator for bad mimes.