John M. Ford Quotes

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

I can't control what a reader takes from a story.

I try to avoid describing one interpretation of my books. Of course I have an opinion. I have things I want to say, but I don't ever want to limit anybody, to have them say, 'Oh, he said this, so that's what it's about.' I'm happy people bring their own stuff to it.

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?'

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.

I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

I think there are certain questions that get asked in comics over and over again, and people want definitive answers, but I feel like there shouldn't be definitive answers.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

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.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool.

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.