James Lee Burke Quotes

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

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 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'm such a first-person writer.

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

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.

My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I'll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible.

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

When you're writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.

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.

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.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

When I start a new novel, I often write 'test chapters' in different tenses and from different points of view in order to figure out which is best to tell the tale.

Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there's a connection between you and the narrator.

Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.

The old handbook on writing is 'Write what you know.' I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I'm not using fiction to extend the narrative.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.

Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.