The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape. — Andrew Vachss
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear. — Italo Calvino
I speak and speak, [...] but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. [...] It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear. — Marco Polo
The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it. — Robert Coover
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them. — Jeffrey Eugenides
Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you. — Barry Hannah
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. — E. L. Doctorow
The voice you believe will determine the future you experience — Steven Furtick
He is a good storyteller who can turn a man's ears into eyes. — Moroccan Proverbs
It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. — Patrick Rothfuss
The best stories are often true...The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries. — Shonda Rhimes
That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something. — Meredith Monk
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. — John Barth
The voice inside your head is not the voice of god. It just sounds like it thinks it is. — Cheri Huber
Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it. — Ram Dass
The voice that U hear is the alchemy of Ur mind. — Prince
the voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls — Friedrich Nietzsche
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. — Joan Didion
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. — Kate Chopin
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses — E. E. cummings
Narrative Voice Image Quotes
10% of conflict is due to difference in opinion and 90% is due to delivery and tone of voice.
First Person Narrative Quotes
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
First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work. — James McBride
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. — Manuel Puig
Follow your heart, listen to your inner voice, stop caring about what others think.
Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative. — Edward Gibbon
Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself. — James Lee Burke
First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success. — Anne Rice
There is a voice that doesn't use words. Listen.
A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end. — Norman Lock
Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative. — Aminatta Forna
Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.' — Maya Angelou
The way that I see third person is it's actually first person. Writing for me is all voice work. Third person narrative is just as character-driven as first person narrative for me in terms of a voice. I don't write very much in third person. — Ottessa Moshfegh
Narrative Quotes
The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved. — Bryan Stevenson
We lay out our lives in a narrative we understand, like a movie, but are you enjoying making it or are you wondering who's watching my movie. — Donald Glover
Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions. — Kiki Smith
The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room.
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about. — Stephen Greenblatt
I think human beings have evolved to appreciate narrative, in the same way that we have evolved to learn language. What is narrative, after all, but a kind of super-language, where stories, like words, are ways of encapsulating information? — Alex Epstein
Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice - A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice. — Alexander Pope
Hope is the little voice you hear whisper Maybe, when it seems the entire world shouting No.
Multimedia is not more media, but the employment of various kinds of media (and hybrid media) for what they each offer to advance the narrative. — Fred Ritchin
There are three types of thought that our brains produce: insightful used for problem-solving, experiential focused on the task at hand, and narrative chatter. Those types are so distinctively different from each other that they occur in different parts of our brain. — Mo Gawdat
Bitcoin is eating the world. It has become a supermassive black hole that is sucking in everything around it and destroying it. This narrative is only going to grow over the next 18 months. — Raoul Pal
There has been a failure to grasp how competing narratives fight for the attention of angry young Muslims, and we have grossly underestimated the appeal of the jihadist brand. — Maajid Nawaz
Writing Voice Quotes
You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born. — Anne Lamott
To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard. — Allen Ginsberg
But the reality is when you write a song, you should be able to strip away all the instruments and just have a song right there with an acoustic guitar and a voice, and the song should be good. — Dweezil Zappa
Don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice.
Todd Glass has amazing energy on stage. Dave Attell is one of my favorites because he's a one liner comic who is always incredibly in the moment with the audience. As for newer people, I think Adrienne Iapalucci writes some great, dark jokes and Sean Patton has a hilarious voice on stage. — Anthony Jeselnik
Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that. — Hermann Hesse
A writer's voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer's voice line the stroke of an artist's brush- is the thumbprint of her whole person- her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms. — Patricia Lee Gauch
Alone time is when I distance myself from the voices of the world so I can hear my own.
You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer. — David Morrell
I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't. — Audre Lorde
When I started writing a business column 15 years ago, I knew I'd found the perfect job for myself. As a columnist I could pick my own topic, do my own analysis, say what I wanted to say and attribute it to myself. Best of all, I could write in my own voice. — Allan Sloan
I think what education gives you is a voice. It gives you a way of talking to a judge. When a policeman pulls you off to the side of the road, you have a voice. When you cross a border, you have a voice. When you are writing to express your opinions, you have a voice. — Richard Rodriguez
Personal Narrative Quotes
They trap you in the toxic narrative that quitting is a weakness, an easy way out or, worse yet, that quitting is failure. I assure you – quitting is for winners and quitting is a skill. — Steven Bartlett
I've worked out of a series of no's. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no's force me to the yes. I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us. — Richard Avedon
Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity. — Henry Giroux
Don't let the noise of other people's opinions down out your own inner voice.
'God' - as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to. — Johann Most
The charade of politics is to make voters think that the personal narrative of the candidate affects the operation of the corporate state. It doesn't really matter on the fundamental issues whether the President is Republican or Democratic. — Chris Hedges
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE — Mark Twain
I asked, Why I received only this? A voice replied, Only this will lead you to that.
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread. — Paul Auster
In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point. — Dan Barber
There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. — Douglas Adams
When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. — Jeff Bezos
Narrative Structure Quotes
One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures. — George Lakoff
Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough... The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy. — James Carroll
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to. — Don Delillo
A woman with a voice is, by definition, a strong woman.
To know how to structure the joke perfectly so that the narrative information is given in the right tempo, in just the right dose - it sometimes takes quite a lot of work. It seems easy when you hear the joke. — David Salle
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story. — Penelope Lively
When you love a teacher very much - as I did Olivier Messiaen - you do have to leave them.One of the things that separated me from Messiaen was my desire to create works with a big structure, a large symphonic sweep. His forms are wonderful, glorious mosaics, but again, I prefer narrative. — George Benjamin
Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is ht quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow".
The F.B.I. was very happy with the article they produced, which was entitled, "The Black Merchants of Hate," that came out in early 1963. What's significant about that piece is that that became the template for what evolved into the basic narrative structure of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. — Manning Marable
I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense. — Matthea Harvey
I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names. — Louise Erdrich
As we begin to become aware of the narrative patterns around which we structure our lives, we learn how to take charge, revise, refine, and even completely rewrite them. — Mandy Aftel
Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character's voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact. — Griffin Dunne
God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character. — Robert McKee
With narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It's a good exercise to do. — Ben Kingsley
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'. — Alfonso Cuaron
I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing. So what I know about writing, I know from my own instincts, and whatever the narrative voice is in my own head. — Khaled Hosseini
One objection I have heard voiced to works of this kinddealing with Texasis the amount of gore spilled across the pages. It can not be otherwise. In order to write a realistic and true history of any part of the Southwest, one must narrate such things, even at the risk of monotony. — Robert E. Howard
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! — Roger Craig Smith
Voice is one of the most elusive qualities in any story. We recognize it when we hear it, but it's hard consciously to create an authentic voice. Somehow voice seems to be the natural manifestation of all the narrative decisions we've made so far. We discover it more than we fabricate it. — Philip Gerard
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? — Anne Enright
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets. — Diane Wakoski
O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice!
O harvest of my lands! O boundless summer growths!
O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb!
A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee. — Walt Whitman
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
The Singing of Swans is a remarkable narrative calling--even compelling--us to connect with our own ancestral roots, to seek our own inner wisdom, and to reclaim our own inner voices! — Margaret Starbird
We believed - and I personally still believe - that the so called Voice of God narration, ubiquitous in documentaries destined for PBS, is insulting to the audience. If you believe in the intelligence of your audience, you don't need to tell them what to think and how to process the material they're seeing. — Jayne Loader
In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking. — Robert Morgan
The ability to walk in someone else's shoes, or in my case, play down in someone else's cleats is one of the very best things you can do. There's nobody in this world who doesn't have that voice in their head. Sometimes it's the best voice in the world, and it pumps you up, but sometimes the voice is down. I wanted my players to be able to hear my voice in their head instead of someone else's because I knew that was a narrative I could control. — Jennifer Welter
I think the major device for me is that narrator's voice. I'm always trying to find a different kind of form to tell whatever story it is, and I wish that weren't so, because it drives me crazy. — Lynne Tillman
I just like voicing films in general. I do a lot of documentary work and it's a short hop really to narrating a character, especially if you're on film and you're there in a visual way. It sounds obvious, but voicing an animation really focuses you on the way that you're communicating through your voice. It's a very specific ability that you need to be able to have in order to pitch it just right. — Mark Strong
I don't really think of my narrator in terms of gender. I think of them much more in basic emotional terms. As an author, you either love yer peeps or you don't. There's no such thing as a "masculine voice" or a "feminine voice". Men and women think and speak and act in, like, a zillion different ways. Also, as a gross generalization: women tend to live closer to their feelings than men. — Steve Almond
Finding one's voice - or creating a narrative voice that has the power to carry your story - is the hardest part. — Danielle Trussoni
There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination. — E. L. Doctorow
To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration. — Joyce Carol Oates
It's actually not very hard to re-set between the adult novels and the ones for younger readers. The narrative voices are very similar, the smartass attitude, the environmental battles. Kids love books that are irreverent and challenge authority, when authority is arbitrary, greedy or foolish. They also love it when you make fun of grownups, and I've spent my whole life as a writer doing that. — Carl Hiaasen
Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is a stylistically daring writer in love with surrealism, credited with being 'the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality to Bengali literature'. But though the (male) establishment used this label of erotica to dismiss her work, the sex scenes have exactly the same transgressive function as her use of chronology and narrative voice. — Deborah Smith
Critics who perceive the first level of Mann's irony recognize that the second voice is giving us reasons to be dubious about various aspects of Aschenbach's life and work. But many of them don't appreciate the second level of irony, the one exemplified in setting this narrative voice alongside the more sympathetic one, and inviting us to choose. — Philip Kitcher
We find in the novella a seamless interweaving of at least two narrative voices, one of which is that of an observer so sympathetic that his language appears to be Aschenbach's own, the other of which is superficially celebratory (except at the moment of moralistic condemnation) but undercuts Aschenbach by means of an ironic detachment. — Philip Kitcher
In some sense that was a blessing, because it forced me to focus on prose. I feel my narrative voice in prose is more authentically me because I developed it without ever soliciting the advice of anyone else. — Kevin Keck
If we are not in conflict with Palestine than why are they so afraid of us presenting Palestinian voices? Of course the answer is obvious, and we see it throughout the U.S. and the world, controlling the master narrative of Israel means vigilantly controlling the narrative about Palestine. — Jon Rubin
I've never been interested in the convention of dialogue that facilitates narrative-it's always sort of bored me. I find myself zoning out just listening to cadences of voices and tonality and this sort of thing. — Rick Alverson
For me becoming a filmmaker was about taking back my voice - crafting stories that would move away from the problematic narratives that the studio system would put out about Latinos. I think this is why people like my films. They're refreshing. They feel more real. — Aurora Guerrero
When I hear music as a fan, I see fields. I see landscapes. I close my eyes and see an entire universe that that music and the voice, or the narrative, create. A music video-and any other kind of visual reference-is created by someone else. — Michael Stipe
With the adult ones, I feel I need to get as deep inside the psychology of a character as I can, and that needs to be first-person. In the children's books, I feel I need some distance. I don't want to be the nine-year-old at the center of the story. I need to have some type of narrative voice. — John Boyne
Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it. — Dave Eggers
My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance. — Joanna Trollope
For me, the main inspiration to write a story or novel is the voice of its central character, or the narrative voice of the story itself. — Scott Bradfield
I do think that the abiding mystery of my origins has definitely had a profound effect upon my writing. There is that thing in the back of my mind where I think I don't really know who I am. And it may make it a little easier to shift around in my narrative voice. — Gillian Welch
John Lane has long been recognized as one of the South's finest poets and memoirists. This debut establishes him as one of our finest novelists as well. His poet's eye for detail seamlessly merges with a born storyteller's gift for narrative. Fate Moreland's Widow gives voice to those who endured one of the most painful and neglected chapters in American history. — Ron Rash
In 'Labor Day Hurricane, 1935,' Douglas Trevor vividly recreates a historical event. While that is the only story in A THIN TEAR IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE in the historical past, many of the other stories juxtapose fact-both historical and scientific-with narration to an engaging effect, one that distinguishes the voice of this new writer. — Stuart Dybek
Simply adored Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope: the voice of Essie, the narrator, is terrific & the last line blew me away. — Nancy Pearl
Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world. — Patricia Hampl
In Conclusion
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