Isaac Asimov Quotes

My purpose as a writer is to communicate in such a way as to challenge the thinking of readers and touch their hearts.

I love to entertain, I love to make people laugh, cry, and move them, perhaps moving them in their lives.

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.

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

With 'A Northern Light,' I've already heard from teenage readers, teachers, librarians - it's been so gratifying. It's amazing that you can take something that matters so deeply to you and make it matter to someone else.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

I guess that is my favorite thing - to make people laugh and also to maybe engage them emotionally and touch them somehow in telling the story.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

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

The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It's the words that break your heart.

Don't ever let the other stuff get in the way of your inherent skills as a kick-butt storyteller. Move the reader, make them happy and sad and excited and scared. Make them stare into space after they've put the book down, thinking about the tale that's become a part of them.

When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics.

I try to write in a way that makes people feel things.

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

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.

I love reading books that can break my heart.

When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That's actually where it all comes from.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

There are two tests that we [writers] have for all of our writing: So What? and Who Cares? There is an answer to both. The answer to Who Cares is that a reader cares, if the writing is good. The answer to So What is that these ideas give us completely new understanding, change our sense of who we [people] are and why we're here [on this planet].

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.