Anne Fortier Quotes

I learned to write from different points of view and not just something I would say.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

As I read, I start to form clear ideas of the characters and allow myself to be a proper conduit for this author's voice so that you will feel you have been on a seductive audio journey.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I hope to be with you as a writer for a very long time, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my work, because readers are the highest form of life on this planet.

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

I write novels and other things.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.