Lydia Davis Quotes

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.

Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

In the end, my reasons for moving down the timeline and introducing a new cast have more to do with keeping myself entertained, on the assumption that if I get bored, my readers are going to be even more bored.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells.

Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.

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.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.

I always knew that if I was ever going to perform something that I wrote in front of an audience, I was going to do the thing I most like to experience as an audience member, which is to be tricked.

I try to mix the characters up and not be second guessed by the audience.

You care a lot about these stories you're writing, and you hope that someone else will care, too.

I'm a huge believer in story being this invisible scaffolding that no one ever recognizes or realizes is actually making the audience engaged in what's going on. There is no formula for it.

The thing about Drew Goddard and Mike Schur is that they are legit geniuses, and they love storytelling. They love creating worlds, love messing with the audience; they love doing things that we don't expect. To get to be a part of that is too good to be true.

I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.

While I'm writing, I'm also the first reader, and I want to write a book where I'm excited about what happens next.

I never look at twists as a way to trick the audience. Obviously, I think a good story has surprises and unexpected turns, and you always want to do that with an audience. But it has nothing to do with conning them or making them believe so strongly in one thing and then kind of going the other way.

It doesn't matter if these characters are supposed to be together forever: if their chemistry gets stale, you want somebody to die, you want to put somebody in a coma, you want to write them off the show - anything to save you.

Every song is true and has its unique story behind it.

Once you have found the right shot to introduce the scene-written your first declarative sentence-then the rest flows. You've found the key to the whole scene.