Garth Stein Quotes

A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.

When someone is on the phone telling me a story, I'm hearing the soundtrack that goes with it.

I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.

Writers are storytellers. So are readers.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

Acting isn't necessarily pretending. It's storytelling. It's giving someone your perspective on something.

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

I love theater. I love the idea that you can transform, become somebody else, and look at life with a completely new perspective. I love the idea that people will sit in one room for a couple of hours and listen.

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

When a story is told really well and is real, even if it's not about their own lives, people can apply it to themselves.

The whole point of reading is that the writer is speaking to you, and if you're not listening, you're not going to have any fun reading.

The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader's added knowledge.

I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.

Because reading is a way of putting yourself in someone else's experience, especially reading fiction.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.