First Person Narrative Quotes

'Troublemaker' is not an adaptation of 'Metro Girl' or 'Motor Mouth.' It is an original story. The hardest part was probably trying to keep the sound true to the novels. I always write in first person, and it was important to us that the readers of 'Metro' and 'Motor' be comfortable with the change over to a graphic novel.

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

I am 150 percent the first person to say it: I am a feminist through and through.

I think it's the best thing I've ever done. I think it's realistic, and it's true to the me that has been developing over the years. I like first-person music.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

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.

Historically speaking, the books I usually connect with the most are written in first-person narrative.

Songwriters I've always been drawn to are people who deal with something of depth in the lyric writing. ...I've always been influenced by the folk song, the storytelling tradition in folk music. And so for years I wrote mostly story songs. I still do that, but as I've gone on, it's gotten a little more personal. I used to write mostly in the third person. I write a little more in the first person now.

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book 'Jane Eyre' by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.

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.'

I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

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.

In the first person, the readers feel smart, like it's them solving the case.

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky.

When you're writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.

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.

I have never written a novel that volleys back and forth between a couple of different first person perspectives. It's definitely a challenge because I had to think about who knows what, when do they know it, when are they sharing what they know or what they think they know, how the reader's perspective affects things. Telling the story in that way is challenging. It does require a lot of revision.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

For me, personally, I'm more comfortable with what I would call third-person entertainment, meaning watching a character that's explicitly not me and experiencing something through a character's eyes, than what I would call first-person entertainment, which is a video game in which I am the character.

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

I had an approach where everything that's happening it should be as though it's an experience for somebody. So if you're experiencing a hurricane, if you're experiencing a car crash or whatever it is, you're only experiencing as yourself, you're not experiencing it from some objective point of view.

Any kind of horror video game where I'm the first-person player and I'm... I suddenly stop caring about the video game dude, and I'm like, I really don't want him to die,' and then the minute he dies, it upsets me. I can't play those games.

If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system.