Jodi Picoult Quotes

I write books that will make 10 or 12 hours disappear, and hopefully they'll resonate with you for a few days, where you'll remember the characters and the story. That suits me fine; I am happy with that.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

I think that fiction has a certain power.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.

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

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

I read 'Jaws' and 'The Godfather' back to back one summer when I was 14 and was suddenly aware of how powerful fiction could be.

I've been changed watching films or reading books or hearing music, and that helps you to live your life.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

Why movies are so powerful is because you are right in there and you stay in there until they want you to come out, and then you've really gone somewhere.

Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

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.

Films can be entertaining without shying away from exploring something. They can be magical and have fantasy, but also can have enough reality that you can be really emotionally invested.

Children and teens take in stories to the deepest imaginable level. What we put on the page can change the people they'll become and the course of their lives.

My favorite novels allow me to imagine the characters afterward and what happened, and that I've witnessed a really great story, where the world goes on.

I think fiction is important because it has the power to transport a reader into another life.

Honestly, I don't focus on what my writing is called. I don't mean to sound artsy and pretentious, I just really can't think of things in that way. For me, the point is telling a story that keeps people up past bedtime, while hopefully exploring ideas that resonate.

My writing could be the most beautiful or important piece of prose, but it means nothing if it's boring, if people aren't listening or reading. I think transporting someone, putting them in a story for a few hours, taking them out of their worlds, is what I always strive to do.

What I always do is go with the stories that put up the hair on the back of my neck or make me cry or make me laugh.