Maggie Stiefvater Quotes

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

Most writers of entertainment fiction tend to receive controversial reviews.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.

The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.

My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.

I'm no good at describing my books. 'Holes' has been out now for seven years, and I still can't come up with a good answer when asked what that book is about.

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

I love it when my books cause controversy, when people argue violently about the ending.

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

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

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

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.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

I write to relieve an intellectual itch. I stumble across a hitherto neglected set of events, transformations, characters, or source materials from the past, and they nag at me until I make sense of them in words. But I also write to seduce and to make my readers think.

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.