Jasper Fforde Quotes

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

In reading we must become creators.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone, and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words.

The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

Writers are storytellers. So are readers.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

I loved stories as a kid, both being read to me and enjoying on my own. All these stories inspired my imagination, and that's what I have always aimed at doing for my readers: ignite their imaginations.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.

Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks.

A novel is a relationship, you know? When you read a book, the writer has done half the work, and you're doing half the work. You're providing the imagination; the words are turning into pictures in your mind. There's an active relationship that's going on.

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.

Love fanfic or hate it, it's getting thousands of people to read and write who otherwise would not have.