Katherine Dunn Quotes

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.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

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

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.

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 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.

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

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

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.

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

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

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

I always start a book thinking that it can be something other than first-person present, and I always come back to first-person present. It's just the easiest way.

Understanding POV is essential, or ought to be.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?