"When it comes to my own work, I've long embraced piracy. I don't see piracy as any different than a friend borrowing a book from a friend, or a single book making its way through a household or a school classroom. To me, the value is in being read. The danger is in losing an audience."

"What I love about stories the most is the power they have to teach us of possibilities that might not occur to us without them."

"Fiction is the art form of human yearning."

"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."

"Keep the physical limitations that some readers have in mind. Not all readers live near a bookstore, or have the eyesight for the small print of most published books, and some have no eyesight at all. Ebooks have been a boon for older readers, both for the large print and the weight reduction. Audiobooks have opened up worlds for the visually impaired. Online shopping and home delivery are the only option for millions of readers."

"Read. This one sounds like a luxury, but if you fail to refill the well of inspiration, how will you be inspired to write words of your own?'

"I'm fortunate that so many major players in my early life [and memoirs] don't read books."

"Fiction is able to take life and transform it and make it into something else.  By so doing, it allows us to see things about life that we wouldn't have been able to see before."

"What I have enjoyed about science fiction from the time I dove in was how it opened my natural space. If I were reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons or whatever, as I'm walking down the street, I'm thinking of the shit that I just read and the world feels a little larger. I'd be thinking that there's more layers, parallel universes and so forth. It has enhanced my view of possibilities. It's kind of like film in a way. Great writers leave space, and that gap in between is your understanding."

"I've come to feel that creative writing programs are havens for people who like to read."

"Your reading and entertainment choices have a direct impact on your success as a writer. If your days are spent looking at the 33 Epic Selfie Fails on Buzzfeed or keeping up with the Kardashians, then you’re limiting your ability to write something great. Garbage in, garbage out.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a fiction or a nonfiction writer—reading quality books is a good habit to build."

"I really dig [Franz Kafka] a lot.  Some of his things are the most thrilling combos of words I have ever read.  If Kafka wrote a crime picture, I’d be there.  I’d like to direct that for sure."

"Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway."

"The problem is that America's record of translations is worse than any other western country.  Fewer than two percent of books published in America in a given year were written in a language other than English.  Fewer than two percent!  And some of those are textbooks.  If you come down to literature, it's a fraction of one percent.  And so it's very hard for American readers to even know about he work because that work is not translated or published in their language.  In England, it's not great either.  About five percent.  But in places in Western Europe, like in France, it's twenty-five percent and in Germany, it's more than thirty percent.  And so writers are able to be heard in those languages and readers are able to hear them."

"We need to be careful about the argument that literature always enables empathy.  There are counter-examples: Josef Goebbels, that Nazi kingpin, wrote a novel.  Knut Hamsun was a great novelist and the most unpleasant major writer of the 20th center.  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great writer, was a crazy anti-Semite.  Ezra Pound, another great writer, had, let us say, limited resources of empathy.  I could go on with this rogue's gallery.  Literature may enable empathy, but it often doesn't.  It can't turn monsters, even monsters of genius, into good people.  That's not the business of literature." 

"The sf reader doesn't expect to receive a complete picture of the world all at once. Rather he builds up his own picture bit by bit from clues within the text. ... This, again, is one of the protocols of reading sf. The reader is expected to extrapolate, to find the implied information contained in new words."

"Some might argue that novels shouldn't have to have a great ending, that we should just enjoy spending time with the characters.  Sorry ... We demand great endings of our movies and our plays, and we'll continue to do so of our novels."

"Simple exposure doesn't make us great dog people any more than reading a lot of books automatically makes us great writers."

"When I go to literary conferences that are non-genre, if it's just a broad literary conference, and I say I write literary horror, they respond, 'I can't read that stuff.'  I'm supposed to just say, 'I understand.'  I met a writer who does historical British non-fiction, from a specific time period.  If I'd said, 'I don't read anything before 1700,' I would be a jerk."

"Stories fuel our courage and offer the cautions that we believe will help guide our own paths." (artist)

"Readers also need to be free to read whatever they like and be able to publicly discuss them and to publicly make their demands known."

"I think everyone should sing and that everyone should write.  Like reading, these should be broadly accepted as social practices and not as fine arts."

"The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library."

"Reading is fuel for the imagination.  Reading is inspiring.  Reading is relaxing.  Reading is a way to keep this 'art' part of your brain active between writing sessions."

"I have always wanted to write mysteries, ever since I was a little girl growing up in rural Indiana.  We used to ride our ponies to the library and fill up the saddlebags with books, and then read up on the hayloft of the barn behind our house.  I fell in love with Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and Nancy Drew.  And that's when I decided I wanted to either be a detective or a mystery author."

"By Story’s end, the listener or reader or watcher has to be at the very least surprised and satisfied by the payoff of the Story’s initial promise."

"I never read, particularly, a mystery or a romance or a sci-fi.  I just read anything.  When I started out [writing], I don't think I had the concept of 'They must be shelved somewhere.'"

"There's no substitute for being a prodigal reader, for knowing the unlimited things that can be done with words on a page."

"[The author] then speaks in [his work] for all peoples, for the united psyches that overflow with thoughts and feelings that are registered by the wind, giving voice to the private, intimate, yet connected lives of men and women throughout the centuries—so that many people, listening to or reading the [author's work], hear their own inner voices also, and feel the contours of their own natures, and universal nature as well."

"Someone who gets to college without ever having loved a book is almost a hopeless case."

"My experience as a reader is that the category boundaries mean very little." (artist)

"Everything changes when we read."

"What surprised me in my most recent reading?  Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach."

"We want to see the hard choices and we want to see where they lead for your characters. None of us can go back in time and change difficult decisions we've made in our lives. So we go to Story to evaluate whether or not we made the right choice. We either find comfort from stories that show us that we've done the right thing. Or on the other side, when we make a mistake, in a Story we get to experience the path of a different course. Risk Free! A new map to help us find our courage. We go to Story to experience life at the edge, where we've been shaken in our boots in our own lives. This is what stories are for…to reassure us that we've made the right decision in our own lives or to help us recognize our mistakes, learn from them and find the courage to change."

"There is no way [writing] students are going to get better without reading.  You must know who your literary parents are and who your grandparents are."

"You need to hit teens right between the eyes with a good book; they'll never get over it."

"If you're truly worried about sounding too much like a specific author, read outside of your genre when you're writing."

"The more you read, the more nuggets you file away, the more gold in your stores, the richer your writing will be."

"It's not one-to-one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations."

"Life would be perfect if I had hours each day to read for fun.  In truth, most of the books I read are within my own genre.  I need to stay up-to-date on the books being published in children's fiction in order to be able to come up with books my publisher will buy.  That's my first priority.  When I read for fun, usually it's in audiobook format, and I'm almost exclusively listening to books written by those who are much more accomplished than I am." 

"One of the benefits I get from doing [book] covers is, I get to read.  The main thing I like about what I do is that I'm away from reality and the real world where I live, in a make believe one—a land of someone else's imagination—as long as the project lasts.  I need that to survive." (artist)

"One of the reasons a lot of us read fiction—including me—is that we respond to characters in fiction as if we are responding to people.  We can have intense reactions to them.  We can enjoy them as people."

"You can tell without even reading if the book you've chosen is apt to be easy or hard, right? Easy books contain lots of short paragraphs—including dialogue paragraphs which may only be a word or two long—and lots of white space. They're as airy as Dairy Queen ice cream cones. Hard books, ones full of ideas, narration, or description, have a stouter look. A packed look. Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent."

"Want to come up with great book ideas? Looking to improve your writing skills? Hoping to turn your writing into a profitable business? Then be a reader!"

"The teaching of poetry has almost disappeared from the curricula of many English departments, and the AWP conferences have become a refuge for people who want to talk about poetry."

"The claim some young writer makes each semester to me [is] that they don't want to read the writing of anyone else because it might damage their own creativity and squelch their voice.  Hard to believe, I realize, but I get myopic Kurt Vonnegut wannabes in my classes all the time. ... Reading helps [writers] find their own voice."

"Give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers."

"'Don't read other authors while you're writing, or you'll end up sounding just like them.'  IF this were true, everyone would be reading Stephen King while writing their horror novels and we'd have oodles of people making 8 gazillion dollars because they sound a lot like Stephen King."

"I believe every story leaves some small impact on the reader.  Perhaps it's as small as a turn of phrase you unconsciously file away, a new word you hadn't heard before.  But something, some thread of it sneaks its way into your cranial blueprint and fiddles with the math a bit.  You may look the same, act the same, seem the same, but some microscopic part of your makeup is different."

"Ten years ago a friend loaned me Parable of the Sower and it completely changed my life.  It caused me to view art, sci-fi, and literature in completely new ways.  I was very moved by the way Butler was able to seamlessly weave in heavy subject matters as race, gender, and class without ever compromising the integrity of the sci-fi."

"Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times about his experience of being a judge for the National Book Awards. ... He didn't entirely enjoy the task.  The title of his article was 'Caution: Reading Can Be Hazardous.'  Of the numerous volumes he had to read, he wrote, 'There were moments when I began to doubt the whole enterprise of fiction writing itself.  Does the world really need hundreds and hundreds of new novels or story collections every year, especially when so many of them are so similar?  Eventually, I had trouble keeping all the stories straight, and in my mind—and even in my dreams occasionally—the book overlapped, with couples failing to understand each other over and over again, and families endlessly dumping their woes onto the next generation.'  McGrath's frustration here would seem to be about subject matter.  Why always the oh-so-familiar psychology of couples and families?"

"Graphic novels!  These books reach readers no other books can.  They're opening the doors of verbal literacy for visual learners and helping strong verbal readers become visually literate.  I LOVE them."

"The further you get into a book—the longer you live with a character—the more you realize that nobody's regular, nobody's average.  Everyone's life is incredibly complex."

"The greatest minds of our time and in human history have spent years, and sometimes decades, to condense the best of what they know into a few pages that can be read in a few hours and purchased for a few dollars … but you're not a big reader. That's a bad decision."

"Reading is one of the most profound ways to gain real empathy for people who are different from us."

"AWP conferences are filled with would-be writers, but they're also filled with readers who love reading and want to talk about what they've read and what has mattered to them."

"The reader wants to see the scenery, hear the music, taste the spices, pet the critters, smell the air, and most of all, he wants to feel the emotions.  This is the excitement of science fiction: It gives the reader a chance to be someone else for a while—someone profoundly different; someone in a different universe, facing different challenges."

"I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do."

"You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas?  Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children.  Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day."

"I once asked a fan who was a homicide cop, 'Why do you even read this? Isn't it a busman's holiday?'  He said, 'Jon, I get the bad guy 70 percent of the time.  You get him 100 percent of the time.'  People like crime novels because they give a certain sense of—I hate to use the words, but—closure and finality.  To some extent that's why people latch onto forensics, and shows like 'CSI' are so popular.  DNA, whiz-bang science."

"The movies have not undermined the influence of fiction.  On the contrary, they have extended its field, carrying the ideas which are already current among readers to those too young, too impatient, or too uneducated to read."

"Fake realism is the escapism of our time."

"How I love the fun of a shocker, the I-had-no-idea-wouldn't-have-guessed-in-a-million-years surprise.  My jaded self reads the summary of a movie or book and thinks, 'Well, I know what that will be about.  No thank you.'"  How I love to be proven wrong."

"I think you can tell as a reader when a character starts making a statement and you can suddenly hear the author talking."

"Thrilling as it may be to read about something extraordinary and entirely foreign to our own experience, it's also wonderful to encounter ourselves on the page, to feel the rush of 'that's me, exactly!'"

"Readers look for the surprises in your story the same way a child looks for the prize inside a box of Cracker Jacks.  If you don't surprise your audience, they walk away from your story wondering why they bothered."

"We readers know the power of fiction." (artist)

"When you're two to ninety-two, you want to be told a story."

"We need a new sociology of literary studies, and we need it right now."

"Things took a more dramatic turn for me when I stumbled across The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. ... I didn't know Bester was a legend in the field.  Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction, but at the time I didn't know who he was, either.  I just decided to try it ... and it just blew my mind.  I think of The Stars My Destination as my origin story: reading that book made me want to find more books that could blow my mind like that."

"The novel about character (in which character is primary) is never going to die.  I still read a lot of books because I'm interested in the characters.  I think everybody does to some degree or another."

"I tried Jurassic Park, and Michael Crichton is ultimately the author who really got me into science fiction.  He's actually kind of anti-science fiction in a way, because science is always the antagonist in his novels, but all of the science in Jurassic Park gave me the confidence to go try some 'real' SF."

"Saul Bellow says that a writer is just a reader moved to emulation, and that's what happened with me."

"In order to really hit a book out of the park, a writer/publisher needs to bring women to the party. The male writers who do count women as devoted readers write stories that often include a love Story within their overarching plot."

"Our job in publishing is to keep creating many different kinds of books and then getting out of the way so that readers can pick their own."

"My problem with realism is that a realistic novel about the psychological problems of middle-class people is a story which is very similar to the life I'm leading, and thus is not too interesting.  Whereas the minute you throw in a dragon or global warming, it becomes very interesting."

"Keep your scenes ... around two thousand words. I also recommend that you treat your scenes like chapters. That is, each scene should be a chapter in your novel. Why? Two-thousand-word scenes/chapters are potato chip length. That is, if you are about to go to bed and you're reading a terrific novel and the scenes/chapters come in around two-thousand-word bites, you'll tell yourself that you'll read just one more chapter. But if the narrative is really moving after you finish one of these bites, you won't be able to help yourself reading another. If the Story is extremely well told, you'll just keep eating the potato chip scenes all through the night. Whereas, if you cram five scenes into a chapter that ends up being forty pages, the bedside reader will have a much easier time just setting the book down before beginning the long slog through seventy-five hundred words. People like to stop reading when they've finished a chapter, not in the middle of a chapter."

"Think of reading as an investment that you make in yourself. The more you do it, the more you'll grow as a person."

"Ultimately that's what led me to becoming an editor ... driving myself to find things that would challenge me as a reader and change the way I read."

"Readers love the sense of possibilities ... of hypothetical worlds that mimic and mirror our own.  Our actual lives have become fantastical in many respects, and the hybrid story of realism plus fantasy seems to be touching that tender spot."

"The happy writer is an open writer: open to experiences, emotions, words, ideas, books, authors, tastes, smells, films, travel."

"The primary point of contact for the reader is going to be an emotional one, because emotions reside in the senses."

"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, cry for, people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"The ongoing professionalization of writing, an outcome of our neoliberal moment, has acted centrifugally on writers, clotting them together in ways that are unprecedented.  I tend to spend more time with readers.  What truly enriches my creative life are folks who do anything other than writing. ... And books, of course.  I don't need much else to inspire me as long as I have books."

"A book is a dream you hold in your hands."

"People want to read varied perspectives and a lot of publishers and agents who wouldn't take a chance before are finally responding."

"The creation of a book is such a private and solitary process, and in so many ways is simply irretrievable—a writer can so very rarely specify exactly what was going on for him or her when s/he was writing a particular passage or scene. This is part of why the fun of writing and reading never goes away, because you can just never get to the bottom of it."

"Perhaps what we really crave is not to have more time or to have time off but to feel free of time. We want to experience what life would be like outside of time. Many people turn to drugs or alcohol just to have this experience. But we also experience this in dreams, stories, and our imagination. In these realms, we are free of time and space. (The opening phrase of fairy tales—'once upon a time'—doesn't mean 'a long time ago' but 'in a world beyond time.')"

"I felt almost dishonorable accepting people's thanks. I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library; fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it."  (artist)

"The most important factor in provoking readers to spread the word about a story is an effect that the Penn researchers call 'awe.' This they defined as an 'emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.' It demands of readers 'mental accommodation,' meaning readers must see the world in ways they didn't before." (artist)

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

"Read the books: sometimes you can catch sight of [the authors] in there. We look like gods and fools and bards and queens, singing worlds into existence, conjuring something from nothing, juggling words into all the patterns of night. Read the books. That's when you see us properly: naked priestesses and priests of forgotten religions, our skins glistening with scented oils, scarlet blood dripping down from our hands, bright birds flying out from our open mouths. Perfect, we are, and beautiful in the fire's golden light."

"Consider what goes on within you when you read a wonderful work of fiction. The experience is, in fact, a kind of cinema of the inner consciousness."

"Estimates reach as high as 70% of the entire book buying market being women."

"Escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with (and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armor: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real."

"Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too."

"A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge."

The View from the Cheap Seats

"I want the books to speak for themselves. You can read? All right, tell me what my books mean. Astonish me."

"Great fiction opens readers' hearts and, once they are captive and pliant, then opens their minds." (artist)

"Readability ... when you encounter it, it's as obvious and recognizable as a mountain. ... It's a way of writing.  It's sentence structure, the balance between show and tell, the balance between prose and dialogue, the balance between narration and interior monologue, the balance between ideas and action, and many other things."

"The books a writer reads are so important; they form a compost bed beneath the rosebushes of her own writing."

"The elusive quality of readability is the heart of everything we seek in publishing."

"I believe in sending characters down fearful paths.  Stories pushed beyond the limits of comfort stick in readers' imaginations."

"I'm inspired when I literally can't put a book down.  I'll leave the dishes in the sink.  I'll bore friends and family talking about people they don't know and situations they've never read.  In short, I'm pitching to everyone around me.  If a book connects with me to that extent, it will connect with others.  The biggest seller of books is still word of mouth, and the most successful books are those people can't stop talkinga about, agents included."

"Just becaue a novel is easy to read does not mean it was easy to write."

"What great writers do is practice the art of looking for the Undiscovered Countries inside every story—because every book ever written is just a torch being carried into an incredibly deep, incredibly dark cavern of the imagination, illuminating only a small portion of the potential ideas it contains.  What remains hidden in the shadows is a rich source of inspiration for your own work—if you know how to mine it."

"It depends on what you think of when you hear the term 'chick lit.'  If you think it denotes a young fluffy girl in designer heels and handbags looking for Mr. Right, I'd be horrified.  If you think of it as reflective, resonant, real stories that speak to women today, I'd cheer."

"Read, and not 'how to' books, but literature.  I think a lot of 'how to' books really give bad advice or the wrong advice.  It's not necessarily bad, but it's not going to make you a writer."

"I'm on the lookout for a fictional person with a good story to tell me... After I make that connection, it feels more like a process of sitting back and listening."

"In order for stories to work—for kids and for adults—they should scare.  And you should triumph.  There's no point in triumphing over evil if the evil isn't scary."

"The world will always need storytellers. That won't change. What will continue to change is how storytellers are discovered by readers."

"Writers and readers have a trust.  You give me your time, and I'm going to give you a really good story that's provocative and it's going to make you think and it's going to make you close the book and have that feeling of catharsis: I wish I could spend more time with these characters.  And if you're not there yet, don't put your book out there; it's a betrayal of the trust."

"That's the purpose of stories, that's what they're for: They make life worth living and, sometimes, they keep us alive."

"They are all based on one premise: what happens next?  If the reader doesn't care, the novel is a failure."

"The X factor on every page is, does the writer love what they're writing about?  Anything you love that you've read in your life, from Page 1, you feel the writer's passion.  That's the thing that you can't put your finger on."

"Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would."

"A story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook."

"I'm much more interested in a poem you can never 'get' than the poem you can get after reading it once."

"If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don't read big Tolkienesque fantasies—Tolkien didn't read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology.  Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff."

"The most important thing that I think fiction does [is that] it lets us look out through other eyes... but it also gives us empathy.  The act of looking out through other eyes tells us something huge and important, which is that other people exist. ... One of the things that fiction can give us is just the realization that behind every pair of eyes, there's somebody like us."

"Readings are social events.  I think poetry is written in isolation and is best understood in isolation.  I want readers; I don't want listeners."

"Do not just read the poets who sound like you and share your particular demographic or political beliefs, but read dangerously and adventurously."

"We become the stories we listen to, read, and tell. That is the power of a story."

"Reading and writing isn't about recognizing yourself.  It isn't about creating something you see yourself in.  It has to change you from the inside."

"The world should be filled with books that some people are offended by and some people aren't."

"Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count."

"Write.  And read.  Read and write daily and listen to your gut.  Trust yourself and take yourself seriously.  Close out distractions.  Choose your own influences."

"A guava tree in bloom, for instance, lost in the pages of a good novel, can bring delight with its fictional perfume to any number of real rooms."

"Read everything but write on your own.  And if you have a mentor, learn what you can then run like hell."

"It is the imagination that must be a strong and supple instrument, ready to lead the reader through moment-by-moment sensual experience."

"Stop talking about writing and write.  Stop reading about writing and write."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

"A good story should always be raising questions—not asking them directly, but instead forcing the reader to ask them."

"You can find everything that exists in the world in books—sometimes in truer colors, and without the real pain of everything that really does exist."

"I think books should be cheaper.  I want books to be accessible.  If books are precious (and as a result, expensive), then publishers win, readers lose, and by proxy, writers lose, too."

"Write the kind of stories that you'd love to read, not what you think will please other people or the market in general.  If you love it, there's a good chance that others will too, and those readers will tell their friends."

"The same thing that gets readers through reading your book should be the same thing that gets the author... through writing the damn thing.  The reader must have sustained excitement.  And so too must the writer."

"In a good novel, the first five words make you forget you're reading."

"You now must read widely, weirdly, wisely. Read everything. Move outside your desired library. Read obscure British literature. Read poetry. Read non-fiction. Read science-fiction even though you hate science-fiction. If you want to do what everybody else is doing, fine, read only in your pre-existing sphere of influences."

"Writing grows out of reading, and has always grown out of reading."

"Write with energy.  I think energy is one of those things we don't talk about enough, and it's so important for the reader.  You can feel a writer's energy on the page."

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

"I talk a lot about our attention spans, and how busy everything is in the world right now, and how much is compelling us in our day-to-day life. ... Short stories have to compete with things like this.  So I want to feel like there's an urgency to the writing.  And that I need to read this story."

"Use that time for writing your novel and for reading great books.  That will make your chances of getting published much stronger than any Facebook post ever will."

"Stories should change you - GOOD stories should change you."

"Know that a poem is published when it's read."  (artist)

"You like what you like. Nobody can tell you to like something that you don't, or not to like something you do—or if they do, it's not going to change anything in your head, no more than they can be made to like or dislike garlic or lobster or chocolate or olives or natto by you telling them to change their minds.  I don't expect everyone to love everything I write. I don't think that if you like something I write you'll like the next thing, any more than I love everything that the people whose work I enjoy do.  There are Dickens novels I think as good as anything anyone’s ever done, and Dickens books I will be very happy never to read again or think of again. I'm happy to know that my judgment is subjective, but then, that's the whole point of having a point of view.  I published American Gods after Stardust, and most of the people who loved Stardust did not love American Gods, and the people who loved American Gods and picked up Stardust next were often very disappointed indeed. And I am proud of both of them, as I am of all my art-children..."

"Summer, like a well-crafted short story, ends much too soon."

"America is a cinematic culture.  As a people, we are familiar with the conventions of film, perhaps more so than those of fiction."

"Short fiction creeps up on you like that.  Shakes you up, spins you around, ties on a blindfold and turns you loose on the world with a bat."

"When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you."

"I exit a good short story feeling like someone's just punched me in the gut.  I'm hunched, doubled over; the story lingers in my thoughts for days."

"It's always been really important to me to write something that will keep the reader turning pages and keep the reader interested."

"The most powerful books are the ones who force the reader to use the imagination."

"What I hope to do is be a part of this ocean of words that offers people something for which to wade in with their raft."

"We need books that are both mirror and lamp, books that mirror the breadth of our enormously rich and diverse experiences and cultural heritage, books that excite our aesthetic sensibilities, that stimulate us to think, that cause us to see ourselves in the Other."

"[Reading] became magic, it became a means to an end.  It became the way in which I experienced the world, but more importantly, I think, it became the way in which I learned about what it means to be human and to be flawed and to want things that you can't have."

"It is a dig at the author's vanity to realise how quickly the reader's eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence."

"The reason we tell stories, to judge from what I have seen among traditional people, is to keep each other from being afraid.  We tell stories and write poems, historically, to keep awe and aspiration and comprehension and the other components of hopeful lives bright in each other's hearts.  Storytelling is how we're moved to take care of each other when we recognize how extremely thin the veneer of civilization we cherish is, and how very hard it is to keep that veneer from shredding in the wind."

"Every great story, regardless of genre, will include a twist.  Why?  Readers want to be both satisfied and surprised.  The more they can decipher exactly where a story is going, the more disappointed they'll be.... Satisfying twists are revelatory in the sense that they add new meaning to all that precedes them."

"We all want to know what happens next.  That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story.  Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity."

"The author writes to explain his world and the reader reads for the same purpose. We don't want to see our stories reflected back because we're like preening peacocks: we want answers. We want truth that relates to us, that speaks directly to who we are and what we want and all the things that block us from our path."

"The reader is free to stop reading, to close the book, to not buy the book.  That reader's frustrations are entirely valid, and that reader should read something else.  I just put it out there, and it is what it is."

"When I'm writing about beer, the readers should be thirsty... When I write about making love, the readers should want to make love."

"Now I believe a writer is someone who writes. Maybe you get paid. Maybe you don't. Maybe people agree. Maybe they don't. You don't need anyone's approval or acceptance or imprimatur or validation to consider yourself a writer. But legacy pundits like agents and publishers don't want you to believe that. They want you to feel that the only way you can call yourself a writer is if they agree. And their approval comes at a high cost.  The legacy world doesn't want you to feel like you're a writer if all you do is self-publish. Because they need you to make money.  Your peers may not consider you a writer if all you do is self-publish. Because they need to protect their own identities, and that means dismissing yours.  You may not feel like a writer until you meet certain criteria. But consider this: who sets those criteria? You? Or an industry that wants to make money off of you?  Readers don't care. Readers just want a good book. Maybe we all should worry less about labeling, and more about writing. ...Writers write. Depending on your identity, that could empower you, or scare the crap out of you."

"Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams."

"Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience, it is a social experience." (artist)

"I like to believe that my readers are as smart as the writers I hang out with, and they will rise to the challenge.  We teach our readers how to read our books in the first paragraph, in the first word.  We set up a contract with them."

"For me, that is the question any good book asks, what does it feel like to be alive, how do we struggle, what is essential, what is felt?"

"Adults don't turn to literature to learn.  We turn to literature to have great experiences, to meet great people, to have a window into a world we may not have otherwise experienced and to see some of ourselves."

"If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em."

"You must write every single day of your life.  You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next."

"I don't read much in my genre because I want my work to come out of my heart."

"If I seduce you into feeling something... then you will decide for yourself what you'll do with that feeling."

"Shouldn't all books thrill you in some way?  Shouldn't all books be page-turners, if they're doing their jobs?"

"Follow your own rules.  Readers want to believe—we want to suspend our disbelief."