Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.

You hope that people read your book and say "Yes, this is the way it is or could be." But then you have no way of knowing until the reader reads the book. Actually, the critical response doesn't worry me. I've had very few reviews that have upset me.

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

With a 660-page book, you don't read every sentence aloud. I am terrified for the poor guy doing the audio book. But I do because I think we hear them aloud even if it's not an audio book. The other goofy thing I do is I examine the shape of the words but not the words themselves. Then I ask myself, "Does it look like what it is?" If it's a sequence where I want to grab the reader and not let the reader go then it needs to look dense. But at times I want the reader to focus on a certain word or a certain image and pause there.

When I'm in the middle of a book it can go up from there. When you're putting in those hours, the real world kind of fades and the world you're creating becomes almost more real to you than the outside world.

Recently while browsing in a secondhand bookstore I bought a paperback copy of The Intellectual and the City, but I was unable to read it. When I got home I discovered that the original owner had highlighted the entire book - literally. Every line on every page had been drawn through with a bright green Magic Marker. It was a terrifying example of a mind that had lost all power of discrimination.

A book , once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, both grammatically and actually, whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

The better the book the more room for the reader.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

Imagine! It is the real power of a book--not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

As soon as you publish a book and the reader reads it, they're making an extension of your brain with their brain.

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.

If you're going to visit and re-visit a book, it has more reason to be a real book, because of that ability to concentrate and that relationship that you build up with it, as opposed to the relationship that you build up with your screen, rewards replacement.

The writer after all is only half the book, the other half is the reader.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

You can't expect that, after a poor fellow has written a book, he should also understand it.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.