A Quote by Peter Heller

All my journalism, all my books are first person, and it's all memoir. Even when I'm writing about the oil spill in the Gulf, it's all first person there.

Peter Heller

Quote Topics

About Books Even First First Person Gulf Journalism Memoir Oil Oil Spill Person Spill Writing

Quote Author

Peter Heller
Writer

I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.

Tamora Pierce

With the Gulf spill, I absolutely merged in the time when I had that infection. I couldn't get out of the Gulf spill. There were so many similarities: the drains and the siphoning and the tubes. And also in the way the earth was hurt, the ocean was bleeding. Remember the video cams of the oil gushing? I couldn't stop watching that.

Eve Ensler

There have been more than 30,000 oil wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico in the last 50 years. This is the first time something like this has ever happened [BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill], and we need to get to the bottom of it, find out what happened, make sure it doesn't happen again. But I think it is very reasonable to continue to drill.

Haley Barbour

My first book was about grappling with my identity and transitioning medically and socially as a young person. At that point, it hadn't been told yet. There wasn't a trans memoir that was written from the perspective of a young person that transitioned.

Janet Mock

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky.

Kate Christensen

I had left the music business and became a conflict journalist. The conflict journalism started for me in the Gulf and the oil spill. When Skynyrd needed a new bass player, they knew me from the Black Crowes.

Johnny Colt

The way that I see third person is it's actually first person. Writing for me is all voice work. Third person narrative is just as character-driven as first person narrative for me in terms of a voice. I don't write very much in third person.

Ottessa Moshfegh

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

The oil spill is getting bad. There is so much oil and tar now in the Gulf of Mexico, Cubans can now walk to Miami.

David Letterman

I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life.

Richard Hell

All of the narration in 'Smile' is first-person. Most of the books that I grew up reading had first-person narrators for some reason. My diaries were written in this voice, and since this story is autobiographical, it just felt like a natural extension.

Raina Telgemeier

After my first novel, my mother said to me, 'Why don't you make your writing more funny? You're so funny in person.' Because my first novel was rather dark. And I don't know, but something about what she said was true. 'Yes, why don't I?' Maybe I was afraid to be funny in the writing. But since then, seven books later, almost everything I've done has a comedic edge to it.

Jonathan Ames

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.

Patti Davis

Bad news, it's going to be a huge environmental disaster, the oil rig down there in the Gulf of Mexico. The good news is they think now that the oil spill will be diluted by the melting ice caps.

David Letterman

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.