Lorrie Moore Quotes

The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

Will the reader turn the page?

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens. So I can do that.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

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.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

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.

It's a novel experience to have one of my books read by a reading group.

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

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

Most writers of entertainment fiction tend to receive controversial reviews.

The way I look at stories is often from far outside, like a god's point of view, and also very, very subjective.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story

I always find it fun to read a script and then find the messages in the script because I believe every story has them.

One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

I wanted to write a story that was different than what I've done before - so I decided to write dual love stories that will keep the reader wondering how the stories will come together by the end.

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.