Tim O'Reilly Quotes

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.

I think a lot of readers are looking for a book they can talk about.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.

Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.

I'm happy to see book clubs on TV. Talking about books has always been an important and invigorating part of reading them, and it's nice that that is getting attention from the media.

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

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find out who else had read the book, and track them down to talk about it

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.

I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.

I'm never sure who I'm writing for, or who's reading me, but I definitely see myself in conspiracy with my readers.

Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.

I'm not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten.

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.

I really try to focus on my books and readers.

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.

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.

My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.

Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.

Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things.