Nathalie Sarraute Quotes

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

A novel is a relationship, you know? When you read a book, the writer has done half the work, and you're doing half the work. You're providing the imagination; the words are turning into pictures in your mind. There's an active relationship that's going on.

I think books make you think in a different way than movies and documentaries.

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

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

My sincere hope is that 'The Da Vinci Code,' in addition to entertaining people, will serve as an open door to begin their own explorations.

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

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.

When we read a book, we have a blurry image that's kind of physical but blurry. But we have an emotional image also. We have an emotional connection to the character.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

I want my readers to feel, to think, sometimes to laugh. But most of all I want them to enjoy a good read.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'