#narrator

I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free. Character building, my father said. Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh. Still, it was better than jail. I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't. ↗

— Laurie Halse Anderson

#community-service #hard-labor #wit #satan

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#hearing #inside #matter #narrator #simply

Judge that boy if you must; for debauchery, for objectifying innocence... but before you finalize your verdict, oh innocent reader, I beg you to scan again that last stanza. What you and I overlooked in our cloud of perversion and nasty objectification was the unrestrained joy of a little girl playing dress-up for the very first time. ↗

— Jake Vander Ark

#coming-of-age #judge #narrator #perfection #puppy-love

You want to know what I truly look like? I'll help you out. find yourself a mirror while I continue. ↗

— Markus Zusak

#death

I was good at digging holes. It was the rest of life I sucked at. ↗

— Laurie Halse Anderson

#life

The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses. ↗

— Arthur Herzog

#character #chooses #enter #head #knows

I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him. ↗

— S. E. Hinton

#being #go #him #i #narrator

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman. ↗

— Ann Beattie

#character #complex #complex character #i #interesting

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature. ↗

— Manuel Puig

#clear #first-person #hitchcock #like #literature

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie. ↗

— Al Pacino

#coppola #cut #days #did #directions