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Reader Quotes

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Reader Quotes

“I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.”

Ifs Writing Book Character Moving Purpose Behinds Reader Comfortable Pages Ultimate Smell Block Novelists Plot Outlines Phony Plausible Synopsis

Author:Clive Cussler

“Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.”

People World Writing Care Voice Style Particular Reader Strategy Novelists Ethical Footnotes Literary Style

Author:Zadie Smith

“The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.”

Ifs Firsts Long Would Be Past Night Acting Teach Novel Teacher Reader Satisfied Novelists Imperfection Behalf Savagery Long Nights

Book:Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism

Source: Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism

“The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?”

Culture Energy Reader Crisis Novelists Engaging Impossibility

Book:How to Be Alone: Essays

Source: How to Be Alone: Essays

“It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.”

Way Humans Wells Art Term Awareness Possibility Poet Reader Majors Significant Novelists Really Great

Author:F. R. Leavis

“Children make better readers than adults. They read as carefully as I write; adults read as a means of getting off to sleep. I get letters saying 'I have read your book seventeen times.' If you're an adult novelist and you get that letter, you should be afraid. You're being stalked. Kids always read them seventeen times!”

Ifs Should Writing Mean Children Book Kids Sleep Reader Adults Letters Novelists Seventeen

Author:Daniel Pinkwater

“Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move andwe live on in peace. This is how it is concerning Time in our lives. And to render its passing perceptible, novelists must... have their readers cross ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.”

Knows World Years Doe Two Facts Seems Earth Moving Time Turns Reading Walks Our Lives Minutes Reader Ten Crosses Twenties Passing Passings Novelists Thirty Thirty Years

Author:Marcel Proust

“The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.”

Ifs Men Writing Wells Feelings Problem Would Be Age Today Wish Natural Religious Audience Reader Novelists Encounters Sentimental Sentimentality Credible Insurmountable

Author:Flannery O'Connor

“In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.”

Lying Reading Reader Promise Novelists Compact

Book:A Cynthia Ozick reader

Source: A Cynthia Ozick reader

“A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of what it is to be human.”

Humans Heart Remember Reader Glory Shame Novelists Vastness

Author:Carolyn See

“I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference; still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them.”

People Ifs Way Trying Mean Stills Hard Character Individual Novel Study Reader Circumstances Psychological Novelists Preference Plight

Author:Alix Kates Shulman

“To be honest, I want readers to be wrung out. As a novelist, I don't have a political agenda or specific philosophy; I'm trying to create a gut-wrenching, intimate, memorable experience.”

Want Trying Philosophy Political Honest Reader Being Honest Novelists Intimate Memorable Guts Agendas Political Agendas Memorable Experiences

Author:Jillian Medoff

“It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.”

Jobs Reader Novelists

Author:Elizabeth George

“It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.”

People Thinking Mean Children Character Sound Pleasure Fiction Principles Love You Reader Our Children Acknowledge Novelists Your Children Only Love Love Your Children

Author:Martin Amis

“I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.”

Feels Writing Sometimes Would Be Courses Language Understanding Goal Forget Novel Reader Mediums Novelists Transparent

Author:Paul Auster

“Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.”

May Book Ends Able Advice Reader Novelists Editors

Author:Jon Weisman

“I grew up as a reader as well as a movie-lover, so many of the novelists I admired - and so many of the great filmmakers I loved - were self-taught.”

Wells Self Taught Grew Reader Lovers Grew Up Novelists Filmmaker Great Film Self Taught

Author:Curtis Hanson

“First-book novelists and storywriters haven't yet failed and so it's easier to publish them - you can gamble on a success. Whereas someone who has written four books that are highly literary and demanding and require you as a reader. They may not be republished.”

Firsts May Book Four Written Havens Reader Easier Novelists Publish Gamble

Author:Frederick Busch

“My job as the novelist is to present the whole case, then the reader gets to render her verdict.”

Whole Jobs Cases Reader Novelists Verdict

Author:Joshua Mohr

“I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.”

Writing Reason Young Simple Fiction Reader Adults Young Adult Novelists

Author:Robert Cormier

“The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.”

World Attitude Teach Novel Reader Built Tolerance Certainty Novelists

Author:Milan Kundera

“The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.”

Happens Novel Reader Hero Curious Suspense Novelists Suspense Novels

Author:Mary McCarthy

“I can't promise that every child with learning differences will become a novelist, but I do think all children can become lifelong readers.”

Thinking Children I Can Differences Reader Promise Novelists Lifelong

Author:Rick Riordan