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I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

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.

I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.

When you're reading, like, a character's thoughts, or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me, that's what the whole point of fiction is.

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

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.