Sylvia Day Quotes

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life 'outside' the story changes the story.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

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.

If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I'd like to be in? Is this something I'd like to see? And if I'd like to see it, would I like to tell it?

My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story.

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!

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Too many writers of fiction don't give the reader enough credit.

But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

Don't ever let the other stuff get in the way of your inherent skills as a kick-butt storyteller. Move the reader, make them happy and sad and excited and scared. Make them stare into space after they've put the book down, thinking about the tale that's become a part of them.

I want all my books to provoke some kind of response in the reader, to make them think something or feel something or both, and for that to become a part of them and work into their own lives.