It’s remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable.

The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story

Before you ask for readers, write the article you wish you could read. Before you ask for the sale, create the product you wish you had. Before you need support, be the supportive friend. Before...

If you don’t want to waste your time on thinking, start reading.

How, then, does the written word work? What part of a reader absorbs it – or should that be a double question: what part of a reader absorbs what part of a text? I think...

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it’s going to make them a better person.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

NEWSPAPER: What great paper is the Earth; what a typeface is the Day; what ink is the Night! – Everyone prints, everyone reads; no one understands.

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

I always like to entertain, first of all, and if the readers take anything away from it that helps them with their own lives, well then, that is a bonus.

The most the average person probably reads in a day is a STOP sign or two. And based on how people drive in Jacksonville, I don’t think they even read that much.

We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone’s hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. – 2010...

I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader...

Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of...

Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books.

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you...

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast—I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people—perhaps...

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.All are continually asking, “What does this represent? What does it stand for?”They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When...

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

If a book is worth reading, it will most probably be worth reading twice.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only...

There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like...

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

Hey, Geekoid!” yelled Duncan Dougal, “Why do you read so much? Don’t you know how to watch TV?

Naked Lunch” that day, but the cafeteria served us all clothing. I like my meals a little more scandalous. I should eat in the library, along with the other gluttonous nudists.

We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a...

Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You’re my ideal reader, friend, partner. I’m your fan.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

The country with the most writers is ironically probably the country with the least readers—USA. And once my parents die, my entire reading base will disappear.

It is not in the gene of an Intellectually blinded person to experience the paradise in the writer’s imagination.

A writer writes knowing that nothing else will elicit the same kind of satisfaction and personal triumph as molding the written word into a reader’s great experience.

Readers can surprise you. Many times, they notice layers in your stories, that even you were not aware of while writing.

In reading you must pursue to become a creator.

If I’m going to write a book every American will want to read, it’s got to have lots of pictures. Those pictures must also move, and all the words in the book must be spoken...

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren’t any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader’s head,...

I don’t think I’m an unkind person, I don’t think my books are unkind, and I don’t think my readers are unkind.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.

There is an audience for everything; our job as writers is to do the work and provide readers with a choice.

Me and my readers, we’re on the same page. That page is one.

The more you read,the eager you read many more.

If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important.

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.

The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene....

When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality....

Aside from sales, the letters from readers have been primarily positive.