Narrative Reliability Quotes

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

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

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?

Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.

That's what I want as a reader - I want to be confident that the book will do its job.

The only rule I have in how I let characters tell stories is that they must always tell the reader their version of the truth. No one likes being outright lied to, even in fiction.

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

With reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report always being tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other.