Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.
I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
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.
There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.
The novel is a game or joke shared between author and 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.
What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader's part.
My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.
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.
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.
The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.
In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.
The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.
As an author, I really hate a reader like me. There's no loyalty.
Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.
The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.
I love signing the books; it's so exciting to see my readers in person.
In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.
