Susan Hill Quotes

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

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.

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

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

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.

I can't read my poem "Distracted by an Ergonomic Bicycle" without thinking of Seattle, where the events of the poem took place, and I can't read "In Defense of the Semicolon" without thinking of Toronto - but why should that matter to anyone else? If another reader imagines "In Defense of the Semicolon" taking place in New Orleans, great.

Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.

I haven't made up my mind about doing anymore Landover books.

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

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

I believe the structure of 'House of Leaves' is far more difficult to explain than it is to read. And while I'd like to lay claim to some extraordinary act of originality, truth is I'm only taking advantage of capabilities inherent in everyone.

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 have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks.

Everyone reads the same words in a book but has a very clear picture of their own.

I don't put a lot of description in the books because I write books the way I like to read them, and that is I like to build images and be a creative reader, and so I write that way.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.

The act of reading a story is sacred, and people build images and all that stuff.

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.