Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

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.

I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.

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

I never started from ideas but always from character.

I hate the term "mystery". That's not what I write. I think the Scarpetta novels are much more character-driven than an average puzzle solver. Writing should be like a pane of glass - there's another world on the other side and your vision carries you there, but you're not aware of having passed through a barrier to get there.

I'm not sure that all books aren't that way. I think that might apply to any book I was writing. The book was kind of the product of this enormous infatuation I had, not only with the office and office politics, but with perspective, and trying to tell a story from as wide a range of perspectives as you possibly can. I tried to capture it all with the first-person plural, but once I settled on that, I used it to tell the story from as many angles as I could. I guess, to put it romantically, it was about a love affair with the craft of perspective.

My first attempt at writing was very unstructured and formless, with shifting points of view. I was trying to understand how long form might work, and I realized I had something shapeless. It was a total car wreck. But I still felt I could pull it off. So I ditched that attempt and started writing in the opposite manner, in first person, with a driving narrative.

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.

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

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

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

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.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

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.

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

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'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

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!

When I first concluded to print the book, I made an honest effort to construct it in the third person.

I try to have something in common with my protagonists, especially when I'm writing in the first person.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.