It's not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers' own creative thinking, then that's got to be to everybody's benefit.
Too many writers of fiction don't give the reader enough credit.
I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.
There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.
My number one goal as a thriller writer is to entertain you. But I've got a chance to not only entertain people, but have them close my book and be smarter having read it.
I think of myself as the eyes and ears and voice of the reader.
Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.
I will say overwhelmingly what means so much more to me than the opinion of one reviewer are the letters I get from fans who tell me how a particular book has changed their life.
I'd like 'Rookie' to be a helpful resource, but I never want it to be too prescriptive. Hopefully, it also makes the reader feel encouraged to think for herself.
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.
One thing we never did with 'Bad Company' was talk down to our reader. And we certainly don't do that with the new story, 'Bad Company, First Casualties.'
Literature taught me that I wasn't alone, that I could become a writer if I worked at it, that my story mattered. Whether a young reader becomes a writer or not, they deserve to know that their story, whatever it may be, is important.
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.
My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.
They belong to their readers now, which is a great thing–because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands.
It's what the reader thinks that counts.
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
Never, ever condescend to the reader. Assume you are writing for someone better and smarter than you are. This will protect you from conventionalism, faddishness, and cliché.
You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.
Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
