Quotes About Literature

I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.

If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It's inevitable.

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.

I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

I picked up reading late because I grew up dyslexic. When I went to college, a friend who was a big reader got me started on a number of writers, including Hemingway.

I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.

I never was a big comic book fan. Obviously I'd heard them growing up from my friends who did read them, but I never was a big comic book reader.

I was a reader as a child, believe it or not.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

If you're an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity.

No, I had not read any other comedian's book. Not that I don't enjoy other comedians; I'm just not a reader.

I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.

The funny thing is, I'm not really a big reader, not a big fan of books in the first place.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.

I'm an avid biography reader.

I don't think anyone wants a reader to be completely lost - certainly not to the point of giving up - but there's something to be said for a book that isn't instantly disposable, that rewards a second reading.