A Quote by Charles Palliser

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

Charles Palliser

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Compromised Every First First-Person Narrator Novel Person Prefer Should Think Unreliable Word

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Charles Palliser
American - Novelist
Born: December 11, 1947

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

Charles Palliser

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.

Rob Roberge

I know I love a novel with an unreliable narrator, and I think many readers do as well.

Fiona Barton

I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can't totally be trusted.

Rick Moody

Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

Henry Watson Fowler

I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.

William Gibson

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

Norman Lock

The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

Sarah Pinborough

I first read 'Lolita' when I was 16, which I think is a little bit young. But it was a thrilling and disturbing read because it was the first time I really sensed that you could have an unreliable narrator, that you didn't have to sort of tell the truth in a narrative, that there could be something deeper and richer and more complicated going on.

Sarah Weinman

You need not wonder whether you should have an unreliable person as a friend. An unreliable person is nobody's friend.

Idries Shah

If someone tells you that George Bush is not the 43rd president of the United States, they might be engaged in wishful thinking, or denial, but if they make that claim, it's either true or false! And you can assess that, regardless of whether there's an omniscient narrator, or an unreliable narrator, or it's shot in vérité, or it's manipulated, it's agitprop, whatever! It makes no difference! It's a style!

Errol Morris

I would love to play a sociopath or, like, an unreliable narrator.

Jessica Rothe

The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

Maria Semple

[A politician is] a person skilled in the art of compromise. Usually an elected official who has compromised to get nominated, compromised to get elected, and compromised repeatedly to stay in office.

Dick Gregory

Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.

Yiyun Li

A Quote by Charles Palliser

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