Neil Strauss Quotes

You hope that people read your book and say "Yes, this is the way it is or could be." But then you have no way of knowing until the reader reads the book. Actually, the critical response doesn't worry me. I've had very few reviews that have upset me.

I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

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.

I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

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

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

With a film, I do my best to understand the author's intentions and try to bring the characters to life.

Seeing people who are actually reading your book and listening to the wide variety of reactions they have to it, is really special.

One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

I don't really read reviews... That's not where my attention goes.

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

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

When we read about reading, we get to share an experience that is usually kept private. Incisive descriptions of reading help us to understand what is going on when our eyes move across words on the page.

I only came to Paris with the intention of showing what I thought was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion was different from everybody else's.

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

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

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