Meg Rosoff Quotes

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

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.

Everything you do on set is directly related to your imagination when you read the script for the first time.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

When you read a script, you get a feeling from it.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

One of the nice things about books as opposed to television and movies to some extent is it's not a passive entertainment. People really do get involved, and they do create, and they do have their own visions of what different characters look like and what should happen. It's great - it means their brains are working.

It's funny, because what happens to me when I read a script, when something grabs hold of me, I start getting these flashes of people or places or things or images.

I don't tend to cast roles in my head because I spend so much time with these characters and the drawings that they're complete in themselves, you know what I mean?

When someone is on the phone telling me a story, I'm hearing the soundtrack that goes with it.

For me, one of the hallmarks of a really great book is that I'm seeing it in my head while I'm reading.

We have to be able to use our imaginations to make the character's experiences real to us.

Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

A book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word to image, connecting these images to memories, dreams, and larger ideas. Television, film, even the stage play, have already been imagined for us, but the book, in whatever form we choose to interact with it, forces us to complete it.

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

Reading is seeing by proxy.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

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.

You can't wait for someone to give you a show. That can't be the first time you're writing and drawing a character.