A Quote by Amy Hempel

Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, "I knew girls who saved his gum."

Amy Hempel

Quote Topics

Another Better Book Boy Certain Charisma Describe First Gum His Knew Narrator Person Reaction Saved Says Sometimes Story Think Way

Quote Author

Amy Hempel
American - Writer
Born: December 14, 1951

Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

James Baldwin

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.

Paul Auster

When we try to describe one person to another …, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job—no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being.

Cleanth Brooks

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

You look like a ghost," Bailey says. He can think of no better way to describe it. "You appear the same way to me, so which of us is real?

Erin Morgenstern

The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.

George Bernard Shaw

I could never describe it to anyone how I knew, but there was no mistaking it. One moment, I was walking along undecided - and the next moment, I knew that it was God's will for me to go to America. I don't think I could describe it any more accurately.

Peter Marshall

When someone walks in and you say "a six-foot-tall man," you miss the opportunity to describe what a six-foot-tall man would look like to your narrator, because how the narrator describes a six-foot-tall man says more about the narrator than about the man.

Chuck Palahniuk

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

William Kennedy

Sometimes you get the cynical person saying, 'Do we really need another book set in Nazi Germany?' But I think you just have to ask, 'Is this a story worth telling?'

Markus Zusak

If you look at most women's writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writer's description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. They're looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.

Lorrie Moore

Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

Mahatma Gandhi

If you look at most womens writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writers description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. Theyre looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.

Lorrie Moore

I always knew from the beginning that this was the only way to write Then We Came To The End - that it had to be in first - person plural if it was going to illustrate how the individual becomes part of the collective. I had no interest in writing the book in a more conventional voice. It goes back to that fascination I had with telling a story in multiple ways. It was the only choice I gave myself, really - I said "This is it, pal. If you can't tell a story this way, you're going to have to abandon the book. Write it this way or give up."