Semicolons. . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do. "
I've put everything I had and I've given my readers 120 percent, and that's the truth.
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Sometimes I write with a particular person in mind. I think it's fair to say that I write for a perceptive reader. You have to get it. If you don't get it the first time you may not understand. If you like repetition, analysis, explanation, you probably won't like my books.
What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.
To make the reader afraid, I had to be afraid.
the labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.
In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.
Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.
Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.
In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.
Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.
I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.
Each reader has to find her or his own message within a book.
Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that. . . the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'
I'm a pop culture junkie. I'm a People magazine reader, an US Weekly subscriber; all of those celebrity magazines get my dollar.
I've always been a reader and a writer.