Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.

The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.

I'm getting a lot of mail from readers, and I'd say 90% seem to be from adults, which amazes me. But then again, I can only write what I imagine I'd like to read, and I'm an adult, so maybe it's not so surprising after all.

Probably, subliminally, I think of the reader as a kind of collaborator. I don't want to say something for the reader that the reader could have said for himself.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

One of the most fun things for me, as a writer, is when readers ask questions like, 'Oh, I noticed that you have a lot of water and baptism imagery in your book. Did you do that on purpose?'

I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing.

I'm the sort of writer who likes to leave doors open for readers.

My characters are based on people I know, but not in a direct way.

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

I'm not standing above the audience trying to manipulate them as a puppet master or a trickster; I'm inside the story I'm writing and making and thinking about things very seriously and feeling very deeply at times, and trying to translate that into a narrative.

A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.

I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.

I wrote a story about a character who looks like Harry Styles. But it has nothing to do with Harry Styles at all.

The sense of discovery only comes when I'm making discoveries alongside the reader. It feels crucial for me to not know too much about how things will turn out. So I try to develop strong characters with recognizable desires and put them together with other characters and see what happens.

When I was writing about Gotham in 'Broken City,' I was writing about Chicago. I just substituted the names.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

I still try to make the "next" book my "best" book. I want to grip and move you in unexpected ways.

I am aware that a computer can’t create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.

There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It's tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft -- I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar. But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.

I have no personal knowledge of, or experience with, paramilitary hate groups, or heart transplantation, or escapees from maximum security prisons, or what it's like to be profoundly deaf. But I've written about all these topics, and the books became bestsellers. I figure that if something interests me, there's a reasonably good chance that it's going to interest the reader, too. As I approach my keyboard each day, I remind myself to have a good time - as good a time as one can have doing the hardest work there is.

That's one of the reasons I take a lot of consolation in fiction. You have years to work on it. I think that allows you to reach for the best part of your reader instead of a lot of the internet stuff, in which you're kind of reaching for the worst or the most shallow part of your reader.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.