Narrative Limitation Quotes

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

At 47, I can't write from the perspective of a 25-year-old anymore. My life has just changed too much and my environment around me.

My mother always said, 'The best way to ruin a story is to tell the other side.'

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

I could never write a book where the point-of-view character was a short person, because I just can't imagine what that's like.

I find it ironic that fear is eliminating the possibility to tell stories that depict our ability to overcome fear

The argument for '12 Years a Slave' was that - yes, it's a beautiful film. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted. It's a real story, and these stories should be told. The problem is, if they're the only stories being told, then it makes Americans of African descent - it puts them into that victim category. And that was my problem with the movie.

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

I can't reasonably pretend to be a transparent and omniscient narrator who brings no personal perspective. That person doesn't exist.