The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.
But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.
My whole damn family was nice. I don't think I've imagined it. It's true. Maybe it has to do with being brought up as Christian Scientists. Half of my relatives were Readers or Practitioners in the church.
As white authors, bloggers, and readers, we must stop promoting diversity as a business opportunity or a chance to buy ally points with our disposable income.
Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.
I have always admired the work of Phil Farmer and was glad for the chance to work with him. Readers today may be too young to remember his classics like The Lovers.
I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight.
I'd rather excite the imagination of a legion of readers and make pennies from each of them than hold off for a larger chunk of change from only a handful of fans.
My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balz...
I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the reader, and I do hope they're on target.
I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.
I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.
When readers close the covers on 'Running the Rift,' I want them to understand that it is not a genocide novel but rather a story of hope and rebirth.
I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.
History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.
I'll be happy if I can gain even the smallest place inside the literary imagination of U.S. readers.
Sometimes I have to compromise my views, but I never compromise on issues like the death penalty and the arm trade laws, despite what the readers or letters may say.
At the core, I try to write characters who are real people with real insecurities, fears, hopes, and dreams, which is why hopefully readers can identify with them.
A system of education, which would not gratify this disposition in any party, is requisite, in order to obviate the difficulty, and the reader will find a something said to that purpose in perusing this tract.
My ideal relationship with the reader is that at certain points they will have said, 'I'm finding this quite tough, but I'm going to hang in there,' then at the end they will say, 'Oh God, I'm glad I hung on, it was so worth it.'
A great comic-book cover occurs when it gets a potential reader to pick the book up and start thumbing through it. That's a comic cover's job: Attract someone's attention, and persuade them to try the issue out.
