Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Herzog

Herzog turns a party joke into a craft manifesto. "Two's company, three's a crowd" is the old social proverb about intimacy collapsing under an extra set of eyes; he flips it into a technical problem that fiction has to solve. The dash is doing real work here: it’s the moment where a cliché gets yanked out of the lounge and dropped onto the writer’s desk. Once you add a third consciousness, you can’t just stay lodged inside one head without distorting the social geometry. Someone will be misread, unheard, or flattened into "the other person" in a couple’s story.

The punchline, "and that demands the omniscient point of view", isn’t really about grammatical choice. It’s about authority. Omniscience is the only stance that can track the micro-politics of a triangle: who knows what, who pretends not to, who is performing for whom. In a trio, perception becomes the plot. A limited narrator can report their own jealousy or desire, but they can’t cleanly map the full pressure system without looking like they’re guessing, eavesdropping, or rationalizing.

Herzog’s subtext is slyly anti-romantic. He’s hinting that "company" is easy because it’s mutual; "crowd" is where narrative starts because it’s contested. Three people create the smallest unit of social complexity - alliance, betrayal, triangulation, the constant recalculation of status - and that complexity begs for a narrator who can hover, judge, and reveal. Omniscience isn’t a Victorian relic here; it’s the camera rig you need when intimacy stops being private and becomes political.