Jason Henderson Quotes

With a novel, you're the director and the screenwriter and everything else, except that you have to write it knowing it will all be performed inside the head of the reader. So it's a difficult and lonely task.

You, the reader, make the book, but the book does not in itself exist between these decomposing covers. You read the script, you are, in your mind, actor, patron, director. Critic, ultimately. This collection of pages is just the beginning of a greater creation."

"If what you say is true, then what of the writer of the books? Great men wrote them, and they know much more than I what is to be said and learned... [the author] surely knew more than I, and besides, the book is complete in itself."

"[The author] may be great, but he still waits patiently for you to read him, and his books are incomplete without you. Without the reader, they are lines unspoken, scripts with neither reader nor audience. Recipes with no food - - and no cook. In a very real way, then, the book is not, as you say, complete. Until you read it.

My point is, that in all of your deference and study you must remember who you are and realize that you are sharing--on equal terms--with the messenger on the other side of the page."

~McDuff from The Spawn of Loki (The MacDuff Saga) by Jason Henderson

I have on my bookshelf a book called 'Movie Monsters' by Alan Ormsby, a kids' book I got when I was in kindergarten. It started there.

Kolchak nodded, 'Right, because that would make sense." He took off his hat and crumpled it against his hip. 'When I lived in Seattle, I met a man who had been killing people for a hundred years easily. I nearly got arrested painting on his portrait in the bank he owned, just to match his face to the hundred-year-old shot I had of him with a beard. It's possible.'

'Why didn't you just take a picture of the painting and scribble on the picture?'

'It was a gesture,' Kolchak wrung his hands, 'and anyway that's not the point.' ("Wet Dog of Galveston")

Stephen King's 'On Writing' is probably the most useful writing book I've ever read.