Amy Tan Quotes

We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.

Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.

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.

That's the magic of books. They're never quite the same for any two people. When you read one, you automatically make it your own.

When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.

I have read your book and much like it.

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

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 feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.

I can't control what a reader takes from a story.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

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

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

I figured I could read more than five pages tonight since I'd been deprived for the last couple of days. When I finished the fifteenth, I discovered I was three pages from the next chapter. Might as well end with a clean break. After I was done, I sighed and leaned back, feeling decadent and spent. Pure bliss. Books were a lot less messy than orgasms.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.

A book should be a garden that fits in the hands. Word-petals of color. Stems of strength. roots of truth. Turn a page and turn the seasons. Read the sentence and enjoy the roses.