Sara Shepard Quotes

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

My wife read Narc as well and was really into it.

Literature has become my life.

I have read your book and much like it.

Very often, I'm part of the deception because the way I play things is that I want you to be able to look back and go, "Oh, my god, I didn't see that at the time, but now it all makes sense," and you want to watch it a second time with the benefit of hindsight.

None of [the books are] worth reading. There are no fairy tales, no faerie tails, no sword-swinging princesses or lightning-throwing gods.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.

Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly.

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.

Probably a good idea, let me know how it ends" "I already know how it ends" "You read the ending first?" "I always read the ending before I commit to the whole book." "If you know how it ends, why read the book?" "I don't read for the ending. I read for the story".

Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.

Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book’s first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.

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.

The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

It's much more entertaining to live books than to write them.

After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.

A writer writes a book. People read it. You don't know what they're reading, really. You read a review and think, "That is so inaccurate. You can't have been reading my book with any kind of attention, because that is all wrong, that's even the wrong name you're including there." But these reviewers have been diminished in importance, the work is so little respected. If you're reviewed by a real critic, by James Wood or Louis Menand, then you get something that is informed, interesting, and highly articulate. But the average review doesn't have that kind of depth anymore.

I like stories about people. I like things that are human and different. I want to be as engaged in my work as I am in reading a book. I want to be electrified by the films I do.

Well, I'm very much a literary person. And my fashion always tells a story somehow. I never look at fashion magazines. I find them incredibly boring. To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I've got books I need to read.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.