Annie Dillard Quotes

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

I just always try to find an interesting story and tell it well. That's a hard enough thing to do, whether it's a piece of fiction or it's a small piece of reality. I just look for good story.

I just want to keep people entertained.

I'm motivated by entertaining people.

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.

All I really want to do is entertain people out there sitting in the dark and for them to believe it.

I do feel it's important to entertain people. I try to.

A good story is a good story, whatever the medium.

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

Movies aren't just supposed to be a representation of reality. They're supposed to be an art.

People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

People want good stories.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

I've always been fascinated with storytelling.

'Hannibal' is not reality; the whole show is not reality. It's heightened reality: they want music the entire time.

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.

In a story, you can turn to the front and begin again and everyone lives once more. That doesn't work in real life. And I love my real people the most.

News is almost more interesting to me than other people's fiction, if that makes sense. But other people's fiction in terms of design is still incredibly interesting to me.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

People just want good stories.

I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.

If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.

Comedy is like fictional charm. It's the charm of fiction. Or the charisma of fiction. When you meet somebody who's immediately charismatic, you're attracted to that person. And in fiction it's got to come out in either one of two ways: in the prose itself, and you're hooked immediately because you never want to leave such a colorful and penetrating world. Or, it's simply being a funny writer.

You're trying to bring a character to an audience, and tell stories. That's what we're all trying do.