Jane Smiley Quotes

For a child, reading a book can be such an intense experience.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

I love character and voice, and my favourite books have been the ones in which I've become completely absorbed.

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.

I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

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

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.

When I read books, I actually really love imagining whomever I want to in the character's role. I get such vivid pictures on my own that that is a big part of the experience for me.

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.

Songs you can dip in and out of, but a book... well, it can overpower you.

If I'm made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as - if we'd been very, very good - she read the next chapter of 'The Hobbit' aloud to us.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

A book is kind of like a river; I simply jump in and start swimming.

Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them. You don't read a book - you experience it. Every story opens up a new world.

However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.

One of the joys of a really good book is that you're so into the world of the book, you forget what you're looking at is words on a page.

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.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.

'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.

I was 12 and read my first romance novel; it was a sweeping desert saga, and I got to the end of it and was like, 'I want to go back and start all over again!' That emotional response to the book and getting to the end of a story you love is what inspires me to write the next book.

What you look for as a reader is somebody who is going to take you and say, 'C'mon. Come into the story. I'm going to show you what there is to see.' The guide who is going to tell you, 'Pay attention over there,' or, 'Do you remember that other thing? Now watch!'