Charles Palliser Quotes

First person allows deeper insight into the protagonist's character. It allows the reader to identify more fully with the protagonist and to share her world quite intimately. So it suits a story focused on one character's personal journey. However, first person shuts out insights into other characters.

I write unreliable narrators because - paradoxically - they're the most honest, true-to-life kind there is.

Point-of-view is a matter that readers rarely pay attention to, yet it's one of the most important story decisions an author makes.

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

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

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

I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.

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

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

I've always written in first person. It gives the readers more insight.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

I'm asking the reader to suspend reality with me and entertain the idea that the person writing is not me. In order to do that well, I think, one needs to point out the artifice of the narrative. Somehow if the narrator is self-aware then it's almost more humanizing and more relatable.

If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

In a way, metafiction breaks down the story and makes it less real. But in another respect, by that very breaking down, it actually makes things feel more real than they would to begin with.

Remember that my view, the only true view I can see with, is through the black eyes that I have.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I'm such a first-person writer.

We are unreliable narrators - all of us.

I'm never writing as a character.