Monty Don Quotes

The test of a good letter is a very simple one. If one seems to hear the other person talking as one reads, it is a good letter.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

I love meeting booksellers and readers and hearing how they've read and received my stories. Often I'm surprised by which characters they've loved best, what scenes have stayed with them, what connections they've felt between my characters' lives and theirs.

Will you come with me, sweet Reader? I thank you. Give me your hand.

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.

I like Q&A's better than articles sometimes because I feel like I'd rather hear somebody actually talk or wrestle with.

I get a chance to observe the moon now, I still see those same images I saw when I was six, and it pleases me to know that that part of my childhood is still embedded in me.

You're looking for ways always as the writer to bring readers into intimacy, you with them with you. Photos can sometimes do the opposite, create distance and perspective, but these somehow didn't. They somehow bring the reader closer.

I use social media not to ask new people to like my stuff. I use social media to connect with that one reader who likes my stuff.

Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.

If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.

Sometimes you read something and it's just -- it doesn't invite a reader....Sometimes you read something and it's not saying, 'oh come in, come in have a seat. I'm going to tell you what happened.' Perhaps my writing comes off as conversational...and that takes effort.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

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

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.

When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

Developing a personal connection with anyone you're trying to do a big deal with is really important.

Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

On a more technical level, a story takes a lot of words. And to generate words and phrases and images and so on, that will compel the reader to continue reading - that stand a chance of really grabbing a reader - the writer has to work out of a place of, let's say, familiarity and affection. The matrix of the story has to be made out of stuff the writer really knows about and likes. The writer can't be stretching and (purely) inventing all the time. Well, I can't, anyway.