#narrator

Judge that boy if you must; for debauchery, for objectifying innocence... but before you finalize your verdict, oh innocent reader, I beg you to scan again that last stanza. What you and I overlooked in our cloud of perversion and nasty objectification was the unrestrained joy of a little girl playing dress-up for the very first time. ↗

— Jake Vander Ark

#coming-of-age #judge #narrator #perfection #puppy-love

The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses. ↗

— Arthur Herzog

#character #chooses #enter #head #knows

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie. ↗

— Al Pacino

#coppola #cut #days #did #directions

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

— Andrew Vachss

#constantly #instead #like #narrator #omniscient

My first job after my retirement from baseball was as a narrator for the Eastman Philharmonica. ↗

— Willie Stargell

#baseball #eastman #first #job #narrator

I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before. ↗

— Rick Moody

#because #before #big #big deal #character

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller. ↗

— Jennifer Haigh

#families #narrators #perspective #religion #secrets

... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe—but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors—for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame—that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them... ↗

— Gene Wolfe

#memories #memory #unreliable-narrator #faith

I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free. Character building, my father said. Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh. Still, it was better than jail. I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't. ↗

— Laurie Halse Anderson

#community-service #hard-labor #wit #satan

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

— James Lee Burke

#hearing #inside #matter #narrator #simply