Rachel Joyce Quotes

You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.

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.

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.

What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.

Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So of course the audience has to be considered.

As I read, I start to form clear ideas of the characters and allow myself to be a proper conduit for this author's voice so that you will feel you have been on a seductive audio journey.

I write books that will make 10 or 12 hours disappear, and hopefully they'll resonate with you for a few days, where you'll remember the characters and the story. That suits me fine; I am happy with that.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it.

When we read a book, we have a blurry image that's kind of physical but blurry. But we have an emotional image also. We have an emotional connection to the character.

I'm an avid reader myself, and what any one reader accesses at any one time is very powerful and personal to them. Clearly you can't even begin to touch that. A novel is a singular vision, and then a myriad of readers have their own experience of that.

For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.

But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.

I want to remind people of the great and profound joy that can be found in stories, and that stories can connect us to each other, and that reading together changes everybody involved.

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.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

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.

That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.

People love conversation, and movies are conversations, and an audience has to participate; it has to fill in some blanks.

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.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

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

I think 'Beasts of No Nation' is a novel that hopefully will affect each person who reads it in a different way.

I enjoy stories that can spark a conversation.

Children basically need one thing: to be played with.