John Green Quotes

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.

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

I'm never sure who I'm writing for, or who's reading me, but I definitely see myself in conspiracy with my readers.

I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

I love trying to forge a contract between creator and audience in which we are able to meet halfway, each injecting a part of our own experiences into a story that's being told.

The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.

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 think that just because you've been through an experience doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter of what it means. We figure things out; we work things out through the help of other people who can engage with us but also be intelligently critical.

When you work with somebody else, you automatically get a mixed voice. You hope it will benefit the story. But you don't know what the result will be.

Words build a bridge between the imaginations of writer and reader, creating something unique between them.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.

It is so killer to collaborate with someone who gets what you're trying to say.

For all the import and message of 'The Iliad,' it's ultimately a story that's meant to be heard, and the person hearing 'The Iliad' determines what it means.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.

You need the audience to go on the ride with you. You can't just isolate them.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

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.

Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?' I realized then that we're all in the same boat. What does anybody know?

As an actor, you have to believe in the point of view of a director; as a director, you have to be able to express what your point of view is and invite everybody to join you on that journey. So it's always about opening up.

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.

That's the great part about arts - someone taking your work and making it something else; it's becomes a true collaboration.

Filmmaking is not a one man show. It is not like I'm thinking something and they are expressing it. I try to pull the actor in and together we try to get the expression. It is not my thinking alone, it is our thinking. The actor also becomes a part of the thought process.