Explore the wonderful quotes under this tag
Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.
Sep 30, 2025
When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority.
I think I have been able to eliminate the idea of a third person: the Intruding Photographer.
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
It pains me to speak of God in the third person.
Opinions only carry weight in the second or third person.
Eff love. Come out of the situation and look at it third person.
No, there are three people in a marriage, there's the woman, there's the man, and there's what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together.
I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.
Death means you are in the third person.
I don't talk about myself in the third person, and I laugh at people who do.
It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
Man Ray takes a lot of pressure off me. It's like having a third person in a conversation; one of you doesn't have to talk all the time.
She's talking about herself in the third person because the idea of being who she is, of acknowledging that she is herself, is more than her pride can take.
A Platonic friendship is perhaps only possible when one or other of the Platonists is in love with a third person.
The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.
I have a lady, she's a great lady. I love her a lot, she loves me. We're on the same page. Whenever that day happens when we're not on the same page we'll move forward with it. We're interested in having our lives be our lives right now and not a third person's vis-a-vis marriage and whatever that means.
George Clooney likes to talk about himself in the third person mostly. He's always enjoyed it. Listen, I don't like to think in those terms, where you just have to completely separate yourself one from the other.
Studies show: Intelligent girls are more depressed Because they know What the world is really like Don't think for a beat it makes it better When you sit her down and tell her Everything gonna be all right She knows in society she either is A devil or an angel with no in between She speaks in the third person So she can forget that she's me
I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
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'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.
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.
Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.
For me, personally, I'm more comfortable with what I would call third-person entertainment, meaning watching a character that's explicitly not me and experiencing something through a character's eyes, than what I would call first-person entertainment, which is a video game in which I am the character.
One should be embarrassed to speak of God in the third person.
The reason the middle section switches to third person is, well, this is middle age. This is the part in her life where she loses track of something that was driving her and has to figure out what's going to drive the next part of her mission, this mission to be an author. I had to push back away from her for a while before we could come up to that really lyrical close third in the final section.
It's maybe every third person now (who calls out 'Norm!' when they see me). It used to be every other person. It's faded a bit, but not too much. They're always going to remember me that way. I decided a long time ago that if I'm going to let this make me crazy, I'm going to be certifiable, so I just roll with it.
Songwriters I've always been drawn to are people who deal with something of depth in the lyric writing. ...I've always been influenced by the folk song, the storytelling tradition in folk music. And so for years I wrote mostly story songs. I still do that, but as I've gone on, it's gotten a little more personal. I used to write mostly in the third person. I write a little more in the first person now.
'Envy the Night' was my first stand alone, the first book I'd written in the third person and I loved the feel of that, and it was different but it was also the same. 'So Cold the River,' I knew, was going to be really different, and that's why I thought about doing it as a novella under a pseudonym, because I didn't want to damage my career.
The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised.
So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity.
Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world.
Third person allows a deeper exploration of the relationships between characters. We can see their misunderstandings and hear what they think about each other. We can create a more complex structure with various story threads running parallel.
When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences - the first person - with what the measurements show - the third person.
I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.
Photography has always been capable of manipulation. Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it's an interpretation. I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame. You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. There's an infinite number of ways you can do this: photographs have always been authored.
I don't like the strictly objective viewpoint [in which all of the characters' actions are described in the third person, but we never hear what any of them are thinking.] Which is much more of a cinematic technique. Something written in third person objective is what the camera sees. Because unless you're doing a voiceover, which is tremendously clumsy, you can't hear the ideas of characters. For that, we depend on subtle clues that the directors put in and that the actors supply. I can actually write, "'Yes you can trust me,' he lied." [But it's better to get inside the characters' heads.]
Tyra the businesswoman is very close to - and I hate third person, but you said it, oh, chiiild, you said it - but me the businessperson and me the person: very similar. I can be in a business meeting and be all 'Wooo!' and 'Oh, child!' and still be talking revenues and profits and cash flows.
Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
I'm a strong believer in telling stories through a limited but very tight third person point of view. I have used other techniques during my career, like the first person or the omniscient view point, but I actually hate the omniscient viewpoint. None of us have an omniscient viewpoint; we are alone in the universe. We hear what we can hear... we are very limited. If a plane crashes behind you I would see it but you wouldn't. That's the way we perceive the world and I want to put my readers in the head of my characters.
You have to figure out a way to endure that little bit of time with the media. Any question they ask you; beautiful thing is, you get the last word. You can spin it any way you want to…If you can go third person on yourself, you can sit down and have a 10-15 minute conversation.
Every time I got drunk, this girl named Nikki would show up. When I got drunk, I was just a different person. This is a totally different person than Lisa. When these two started to battle it out, I had to create a third person to come in and straighten the two of them out. Nina, my evil twin who came from within, who I blame my sins on. (satanic alter) All the problems I did have stemmed from what I was doing - I was creating all these different personalities.
But many, many stories were told; from what could be gathered, all fifty of the mine's inhabitants had reacted on each other, two by two, as in combinatorial analysis, that is to say, everyone with all the others, and especially every man with all the women, old maids or married, and every woman with all the men. All I had to do was to select two names at random, better if different sex, and ask a third person, "What happened with those two?" and lo and behold, a splendid story was unfolded for me, since everyone knew the story of everyone else.
Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person; they make friendships as kings of old made leagues, who sacrificed some poor animal betwixt them, and commenced strict allies; so the ladies, after they have pulled some character to pieces, are from henceforth inviolable friends.
[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon.
No body of men can be said to authorize a man to act as their agent, to the injury of a third person.
In a new campaign ad, Jeb Bush referenced 'The Godfather' and said his nickname used to be 'Veto Corleone' because he vetoed so many bills in Florida. When you're the third person in your family to run for president, maybe you shouldn't bring up a movie trilogy where the third one was clearly the worst.
With the latitude of unbounded scurrility, it is easy enough to attain the character of a wit, especially when it is considered how wonderfully pleasant it is to the generality of the public to see the folly of their acquaintance exposed by a third person.
Oh, good. You're starting to talk about yourself in the third person. That's not a sign of impending megalomania or anything.