Jan Brett Quotes

My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.

..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

I figured I could read more than five pages tonight since I'd been deprived for the last couple of days. When I finished the fifteenth, I discovered I was three pages from the next chapter. Might as well end with a clean break. After I was done, I sighed and leaned back, feeling decadent and spent. Pure bliss. Books were a lot less messy than orgasms.

My imagination doesn't require anything more of the book than to provide a framework within which it can wander.

Avid readers are enchanted by meaning, which is available chiefly in books.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Books are just dead words on paper and it is the readers who bring the stories alive. Previously, writers wrote a book and sent it out into the world. A couple of months after publication letters from readers might arrive. And, leaving aside the professional reviews, it is really the reader's opinions that the writer needs. They vote for a book - and a writer - with their hard earned cash every time they go into a bookstore (or online - that's my age showing!) and buy a book.

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.

Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.

The most important thing whenever we're connecting kids to books, is that we try to match the book to the kid and make sure that reading is a fun, rewarding experience outside the classroom.

But when you read books you almost feel like you're out there in the world. Like you're going on this adventure right with the main character. At least, that's the way I do it. It's actually not that bad. Even if it is mad nerdy.

Having a sense of fun in books is a huge, huge deal, because a lot of times kids - even me when I got to third or fourth grade - don't associate reading with fun.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Books are like sapphires; they must be polished - polished! or else you insult your readers.

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

With a 660-page book, you don't read every sentence aloud. I am terrified for the poor guy doing the audio book. But I do because I think we hear them aloud even if it's not an audio book. The other goofy thing I do is I examine the shape of the words but not the words themselves. Then I ask myself, "Does it look like what it is?" If it's a sequence where I want to grab the reader and not let the reader go then it needs to look dense. But at times I want the reader to focus on a certain word or a certain image and pause there.

Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.