Narrative Voice Quotes

• Finding one's voice - or creating a narrative voice that has the power to carry your story - is the hardest part.

  Danielle Trussoni

  Creating, Stories, Hardest

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Inspiration, Writing, Character

  "Go Forth (Vol. 15)". Interview with Brandon Hobson, logger.believermag.com. September 10, 2013.

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• 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

  Blessing, Focus, Advice

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Writing, School, College

  Interview with James Mustich, www.csmonitor.com. November 24, 2008.

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• 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

  Suicide, Boys, Able

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• 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

  Fun, Attitude, Book

  "'True-life Source Material Is Fabulously Bizarre' - Carl Hiaasen Answers Our Questions about 'Razor Girl'". Interview with Adrian Liang, www.amazonbookreview.com. September 07, 2016.

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Voice

  "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. July 18, 2011.

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• 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

  Children, Distance, Book

  "John Boyne hates celebrity children's books". Interview with Kelly Gallucci, www.usatoday.com. April 11, 2014.

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• 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

  Mean, Two, Ironic

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 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

  Appreciate, Giving, Dubious

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 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

  Sex, Males, Labels

  Source: thequietus.com

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• A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story.

  Thomas Boswell

  Baseball, Art, Two

  Thomas Boswell (1982). “How life imitates the World Series: an inquiry into the game”, Doubleday

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