Authorial Viewpoint Quotes

“The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as an artist your daemon constrains you to "observe", to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatever.”
― Joseph Campbell

“It is necessary at this point to recount what actually occurred, as opposed to what was generally supposed to have occurred, on that terrible evening when Lucas killed a man.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“What was to change many lives happened, and happened very fast in the next moments.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“If at that moment Clement had caught sight of the dog and had managed to capture him, the fates of a number of people in this story would have been entirely different. Such is the vast play of chance in human lives.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls