Fiction Readers Quotes

#1. One of the many things that surprised me about 'Wool' is how many of its fans don't consider themselves science fiction readers.

Hugh Howey

#2. I feel that there is not an endlessly expandable universe of fiction readers.

Jonathan Galassi

#3. Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.

Walter Jon Williams

#4. Here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers.

Sandra Tsing Loh

#5. Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist.

Joseph Epstein

#6. Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.

Nancy Kress

#7. That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.

Paul Di Filippo

#8. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers.

Barbara Kingsolver

#9. Sylvia Day delivers readers to a fantasy world as unique as it is erotic! Ms. Day is an up-and-coming talent in the world of erotic fiction. [on Pleasures of the Night ]

Toni Blake

#10. The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can't manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

#11. Do what you love, especially if your sharing the word

Ann Simpson

#12. Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?

Jill Ker Conway

#13. Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

John Hersey

#14. I have been induced to adopt this course by a desire that my readers should be taught to think as well as to experiment, and thus be qualified at an early part of their study to discriminate between the true and the false, and acquire the facts of the science without being mystified by its fictions.

John Joseph Griffin

#15. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.

Jonathan Franzen

#16. I like to take certain aspects of genre fiction and modify them in my own way. 'Your Republic Is Calling You' follows the form of a spy novel, but it leads readers into a world of Kafkaesque irrationality.

Kim Young-ha

#17. Jerel Law has crafted a fantastic story that will leave every reader wanting more. Stop looking for the next great read in fantasy fiction for young readers-you've found it!

Robert Liparulo

#18. Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.

Floyd Skloot

#19. I'm such a huge fan of fan fiction, to me it's a great way for readers to become writers. It's like putting the training wheels on for writing.

Hugh Howey

#20. One of the questions writers bump up against in their work, whether they know it or not, is about lying. Because fiction is a form of deceit, and one's abilities are measured by how convincingly one can persuade readers that these events really happened.

Damon Galgut

#21. However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.

Samuel R. Delany

#22. Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'

Bharati Mukherjee

#23. Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.

Pamela Sargent

#24. The characters act for reasons that they can't control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it's all just puppetry on the part of the writer.

Johnny Rich

#25. Women readers kept fiction alive - here was another one.

John Irving

#26. If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

Yann Martel

#27. Do you mean that Zane is some kind of bird magnet?

C.J. Milbrandt

#28. Why do I write historical fiction? Johnny Tremain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island of the Blue Dolphins-that's why. I'll never forget how it felt to read those books. I want to write books with the same power to transport readers into another time and place.

Jennifer Armstrong

#29. In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.

James Gunn

#30. I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,

John Green

#31. People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books.

Harvey Pekar

#32. I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.

Jean M. Auel

#33. Fiction has the incredible power to put readers into the lives and minds of characters whose backgrounds and natures are nothing like theirs, and create an empathy and understanding that readers can take into the real world.

Cheryl B. Klein

#34. In Land of Milk and Money, Anthony Barcellos mines rich family history to create a full-blooded tale that readers will find insightful, rewarding, and entertaining.

John Lescroart

#35. In fiction, a reaction shot is a brief portrayal of how your character reacts to something that someone else has done. In contrast to more direct character building, your guy doesn't initiate the sequence; he completes it. Exactly how he completes it can tell readers a lot about him.

Nancy Kress

#36. I love smart commercial fiction. Susan Isaacs, for example and the readers who interest me are, in the preponderance, women. I am one of them; I like the books they like.

Beth Gutcheon

#37. Most readers of historical fiction are content to just get caught up in a good story, and that is what I want to do as an author. I am not concerned with people knowing exactly what I made up and what is real.

Melanie Benjamin

#38. ... it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass ... by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

Marcel Proust

#39. I've stopped reading about the death of books because it's wasteful and morbid and insulting to the authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers that keep the world community of fiction interesting.

Patrick DeWitt

#40. It's their failure, my little Anna, not yours. Men who try to understand the world without the help of children are like men who try to bake bread without the help of yeast.

Gavriel Savit

#41. I think the 'New York Times' reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you're a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction.

Jodi Picoult

#42. Life might be stranger than fiction, but fiction allows many writers to more accurately portray life to their readers.

Jaime Buckley

#43. All writers and their readers should stand up and voice their opposition to financial services companies censoring books. Authors should have the freedom to publish legal fiction, and readers should have the freedom to read what they want.

Mark Coker

#44. Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.

Nicholas Royle

#45. Butler's novel 'Kindred' may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979.

Karen Joy Fowler

#46. Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It's like network television. I'm your local cable access station.

Thomas Ligotti

#47. Never patronize your readers. That means don't talk down to them.

Tom Greer

#48. All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are "correct". For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender's Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

Orson Scott Card

#49. For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten "toptypsical" meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite.

Philip Kitcher

#50. Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

Barbara Kingsolver

#51. Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You're my ideal reader, friend, partner. I'm your fan.

Brook Tesla

#52. Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

Mark Haddon

#53. Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.

Evan Osnos

#54. I think readers nowadays are happy to have genres blurred. We're seeing that on screen too: The Pirates of the Caribbean mashes up history and fantasy, Cowboys and Aliens mixes the Western and the Science Fiction genres.

Colette Freedman

#55. It seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.

Sarah Caudwell

#56. All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

Kate Morton

#57. Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

John Green

#58. I write fiction not for my readers and not for myself. I write fiction for the sake of those odd heroic characters that are contained therein. They are counting on me as much as I am counting on them.

Nicholas Trandahl

#59. Fiction supplies the only philosophy that may readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world.

Dorothea Brande

#60. Writers and readers are still trying to work out unresolved problems between men and women, and that is why millions of women around the world are hooked on romantic fiction. So am I.

Charlotte Lamb

#61. What if most of the technologies readers and cinemagoers are presented with in bestselling books and blockbuster movies are not science fiction, but science fact? What if they currently exist on the planet, but are suppressed from the masses?

James Morcan

#62. I realize that, to many readers, Hard Fantasy may seem to be a contradiction in terms. Fantasy, according to most generally recognized definitions, differs from both 'real world' fiction and 'science fiction' in that magic or magical creatures are active elements.

Jane Lindskold

#63. All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

Steve Almond

#64. I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

Isabel Allende

#65. The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.

Jacques Barzun

#66. The wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#67. Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

Philip Roth

#68. Paranormal fiction offers authors - and readers - the chance to answer the question, 'What if?' All the different ways that question can be answered make for extremely entertaining reading.

Jeaniene Frost

#69. Fantasy stories will always be popular, as there are always readers who are willing to escape, freely, to the worlds that the authors create, and spend time with the characters we give life to.

Jason Ellis

#70. In general, I write for ages 12 and up - although I've received emails from readers between the ages of seven and seventy. My books are science fiction.

Marie Lu

#71. Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.

C.S. Lewis

#72. Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.

Bell Hooks

#73. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.

Haruki Murakami

#74. I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It's my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories.

Nicholas Trandahl

#75. Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.

H.P. Lovecraft

#76. To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.

Alan Joshua

#77. In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

Ben Bova

#78. I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

Jodi Picoult

#79. Dangerous Visions, which had, almost single-handedly, changed the way readers thought about science fiction. Since Ellison had been at least partially successful

Al Sarrantonio

#80. It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

E.L. Doctorow

#81. Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

Sara Sheridan

#82. History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

Edward M. Lerner

#83. The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.

Gregory Benford

#84. The built-in form is a window frame. You can use this genre [crime fiction] to go where you want to go, and explore what you want to explore. In some ways it gives you a lot of freedom because you have a framework readers are looking for.

Michael Connelly

#85. A community that engages readers and culturally enabled people to connect, support and harness intellectual and cultural capabilities.

Ashwin Sanghi

#86. I write for those who desire, not publication at any cost, but publication one can be proud of
serious, honest fiction, the kind of novel that readers will find they enjoy reading more than once, the kind of fiction likely to survive.

John Gardner

#87. For years, we in publishing have been hearing from Catholic readers that they really yearn for Catholic fiction.

Regina Doman

#88. Why else do we write and write except to move our readers?

Jerome Charyn

#89. I don't write non-fiction because I get bored. Some of my writing is autobiographical, but not the way readers imagine. I use my memory of settings, events and people. I weave history into my stories, but my narratives are made up.

Sefi Atta

#90. Hello Readers! I look forward to adding to my author page. I

Rita Gard Seedorf

#91. The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

Philip Roth

#92. My feeling about fiction, regardless of the genre, is that it is meant to be a representation of life. I want my books to give a whole spectrum of experiences to my readers. Not just fear or terror or revulsion, but excitement, laughter, pain, sorrow, desire, etc.

Richard Laymon

#93. I do not allow fan-fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan-fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.

Anne Rice

#94. While researching my first book, I discovered so many fascinating tidbits that I wanted to share them with readers to remind them that while the book was fiction, the situations were based on historical realities - some of which were pretty hard to believe.

Julie Klassen

#95. I write adult fiction, but a good 40 to 50 per cent of my readers are teenagers. I love that if they have to grow up and move past JK Rowling they can move to me. From Jo to Jodi!

Jodi Picoult

#96. I am trying to come up with some "adult" reads, but I mostly read young adult fiction (my job), which, by the way is excellent. I will post about some of my favorites that should appeal to adult readers

Megan McCafferty

#97. I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.

Alex Flinn

#98. Misconceptions about Young Adult fiction aren't new to fans of the genre. From being dismissed as mindless fluff for 'Twilight'-obsessed tweens, to constant warnings that the genre is dying, kerfuffles between the media and readers occur with alarming regularity.

Jennifer Armintrout