Crittenden Marriott: Third. In the first the quotation marks are such a bother.
Homer I. McEldowney: The third person. It is easier, for me, and, I think, more effective.
Ray McGillivray: Fifty-fifty with me. First person is easier. The third person style has been responsible for most of the best literature ever written. Not all, but most.
Helen Topping Miller: I have never written anything in the first person—it intrudes the personal idea and hampers my view-point. I prefer to see my characters impersonally.
Thomas Samson Miller: The first person always seemed to me the more plausible, for in the third person the author often relates actions and happenings that occurred thousands of miles apart at the same time. I can never forget that some one is telling me the story and that some one couldn't be—say in the heroine's bedroom, if he is a man author.
Anne Shannon Monroe: It is easier to write in the first person—more easily made real; but I prefer the third. The third is less personal, more the spectator's account of the whole. Writing in the first, there are many things you can't tell, because you, as one of the characters, can't know it all; as a spectator—a sort of on-looking creator—you can know it all.
L. M. Montgomery: Personally I prefer writing in the first person, because it then seems easier to live my story as I write it. Since editors seem to have a prejudice against this, I often write a story in the first person and then rewrite it, shifting it to the third. As a reader, I enjoy a story written in the first person far more than any other kind. It gives me more of a sense of reality—of actually knowing the people in it. The author does not seem to come between me and the characters as much as in the third-person stories. Wilkie Collins's Woman in White is a fine example of the use of the first person. It could not have been half so effective had he told it in the third. And Jane Eyre simply couldn't have been written in any but the first.
Frederick Moore: I like to write in the third person, because then I'm a god—all seeing, all knowing, all controlling—so far as the characters are concerned.
Talbot Mundy: On the whole, I think, the third person. It is easier to keep things concrete, and to keep off the paper the mental actions and reactions of Number One.
Kathleen Norris: A story in the first person is limited because the teller of it is presumably the hero, and consequently he has to imply his own merit, beauty or intelligence. More than that, he must be present at every scene related and the plot must move in spite of him, as it were. This sort of story was enormously popular in Dickens' day, but it does not fit the new American type of novel.