Anthony Doerr Quotes

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I'll usually see a scene in my head, playing like a movie trailer. After I've written that scene, everything takes off from there.

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

When I write, I'm still imagining a kid reading it on paper. I read e-books when I travel, but in general I still prefer holding an old-fashioned book in my hands. There's a special, tactile experience.

At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.

I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.

Despite its challenges, the novel offers an opportunity to live in one story for years of your imaginative life. There's a tremendous richness to that.

When you read a novel, your own imagery is the most important. It's what makes reading such a wonderful thing.

When you read a book, you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination.

Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading.

Everything's always about page-turning, right? What's next? So, if you create questions for audiences, then they'll want to know the answer. Or they begin to formulate possible outcomes. That's the game we play when we're hearing a story unfold. That's part of what sucks us into a movie.

To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.

A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.

I read actual books. It's cool to read on a Kindle if that's what you want to do, but for me, I like having a bookshelf.

A novel quite possibly won't be good and, even more possibly, will have not-good parts, but at least it won't shape-shift on you; at least you can say that you're halfway through and know that this maps onto some clear, visualizable chunk of narrative.

In a book, you can kind of take time and have lulls in places.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

I think, what's the point of writing a book that you would get in one sitting?

I must say, some are not very beautifully made. They’re coffee-table books for people who drink alcohol. I have nothing against coffee-table books as long as they are well done. They must not look like gravestones on a table. Sometimes they are too big, they come in boxes and things like this. No, a book has to be easy to open and you don’t have to be a bodybuilder to lift it. I like books I can read in bed. Those big tombstones would kill me.

I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book as we've always known it is an efficient technology.

I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end, where the reader was assured that the knight and the fair maiden lived together happily ever after.

I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.