John Piper Quotes

I want all my books to provoke some kind of response in the reader, to make them think something or feel something or both, and for that to become a part of them and work into their own lives.

By making the place and the people and the feelings real, by the time someone closes the cover of one of my books, they have, hopefully, felt all of the emotions of life.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

Before I wrote The Power of Now, I had a vision that I had already written the book and that it was affecting the world. I had a sense there was already a book somehow in existence. I drew a circle on a piece of paper and it said "book." Then I wrote something about the effect the book had on the world, how it influenced my life and other people's lives, and how it came to be translated into many languages affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

After I saw my first poem published, I became interested in the immortalization of words and the fact that you could put something out there that you felt and that meant something to you, and that it could be interpreted by many different people to mean many different things.

Good books leave an impression. Great books forever alter the way you think about what it means to be alive. You Disappear is not just a well-told story, but a dramatic recalibrating of what it means to have a mind-and a soul.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

When I sign books, I get lines of people and what they usually say is: "Thank you. You have changed my life." I am really moved by that.

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

Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time.

I feel like people who become writers are people who have been saved by books.

One of the most famous lines in contemporary Russian poetry is "Erica makes four copies and that's enough." That's the ethos we're aiming for. This is not to say I don't want lots of people to read my book, I do. I especially want people to read it who will feel better, and safer, or at least understood.

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

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.

You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.

Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.

One thing I love about Cormac McCarthy is the types of pressure he puts onto people. You see the best and the worst in people, you really see what humanity is made of, and I think that resonates in some way.

I hope people will find the book [Superficial: More Adventures from the Andy Cohen Diaries] a whole lot more than hollow.

I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enable you to live.