Ronald Frame Quotes

The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.

The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize.

Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.

I'd say most of my songs I write from personal experience. When I feel like I don't have any inspiration in my personal life, I think about others that are close to me and maybe what they're going through or even just people I've come across, acquaintances.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

Because reading is a way of putting yourself in someone else's experience, especially reading fiction.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

As a writer, I'm driven by settings. Others are driven by characters or predicaments, but with me, settings come first.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.