Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

Amplitude is a powerful quality in fiction. It results in involvement, in sympathy with the characters. After a while, a reader can't avoid being involved with a book, caring about it, even if it's not a particularly good book. You're in it, and you're committed to it.

A book brings its own history to the reader.

Books are just dead words on paper and it is the readers who bring the stories alive. Previously, writers wrote a book and sent it out into the world. A couple of months after publication letters from readers might arrive. And, leaving aside the professional reviews, it is really the reader's opinions that the writer needs. They vote for a book - and a writer - with their hard earned cash every time they go into a bookstore (or online - that's my age showing!) and buy a book.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

Success is measured by the memories you create.

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

I hope that I can make music that helps people in some way or that they can connect with, and that I can just live a life where I'm surrounded by people that I love.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

Some people come into your life and leave a mark.

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

A book is like a single tree in a forest, in that it exists in conjunction with and because of a great many others around it.

Miracles is the sort of book that once you've read it you'll wonder where it's been all your life

A book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word to image, connecting these images to memories, dreams, and larger ideas. Television, film, even the stage play, have already been imagined for us, but the book, in whatever form we choose to interact with it, forces us to complete it.

Spend time with those you love. One of these days you will say either, 'I wish I had', or 'I'm glad I did.'

Popularity ends on yearbook day-Respect stays forever.

Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

With the audience I write for, I want to make sure that the reader is eagerly turning every page. I want each of my books to be an absorbing reading experience, an authentic piece of literature. The worst thing that can happen is for a book to have a chilling effect on the reader, to have a kid pick it up and look at a bunch of footnotes and think, No, I'm not going to read this, it's too intimidating.

The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.