Samuel West Quotes

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

A novel is a relationship, you know? When you read a book, the writer has done half the work, and you're doing half the work. You're providing the imagination; the words are turning into pictures in your mind. There's an active relationship that's going on.

Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

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

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

the process of a book's coming to life is not fully complete until your imagination meets mine on the page. The words evoke pictures and something altogether new is created, something different from the limits of my own skills and imagination. Something that is a marriage between your heart, mind, and body - and mine.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

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.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.

Probably, subliminally, I think of the reader as a kind of collaborator. I don't want to say something for the reader that the reader could have said for himself.

I'm the sort of writer who likes to leave doors open for readers.

I think a book is often an account, or a series of accounts, that create a world that is sort of half of the world. There are references to a world, and then the reader supplies the other fifty percent.

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

In a graphic novel, you have to allow for a certain amount of freedom on the reader's part to experience it how they choose.

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.

When I first moved up to San Francisco to write Where The Wild Things Are, I had a couple moments where I talked to somebody, and they're like, "Oh, I love that book. I love this part of it," or, "This is what it means to me." And it's like, "Well, I don't know. I guess that's not what I'm making the movie about." But very early on, I don't know, we sort of let go of that fear.

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.