Howard Gordon Quotes

I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It's inevitable.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

The reason we fall in love with certain music and writing is we connect with it on a very personal level.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.

The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.

Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.

I always write my novels with music (I don't listened to the music seriously.) Music seems to encourage me.

I never want to feel constrained by writing a novel for a specific audience.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.

The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.