Reading Fiction Quotes

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.
I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Only occasionally do I read new fiction. Most of my reading is heavily dictated by what I'm writing at the time. ~ Simon Mawer

Well, there's good fiction. There are wonderful books, and yes, it's good to read them. Maybe if you've read a lot of fiction, you reach this stage of satiation, and you start thinking well, what's the point, but then you talk to people who've read barely any, and you realize that things you take for granted if you've read a lot of fiction - unreliable narrators, how language frames your perception of people - things that seem obvious to the point of banality, except they're not to people who aren't in the habit of reading fiction. ~ Helen DeWitt

I'm always reading several books at the same time, depending on how deeply engrossed in it I am, if it's fiction and if it captures me. ~ Andie MacDowell

The joy of reading is in discovery; a good writer creates, "gaps, spaces, and absences," in a richly layered text. He/she creates a desire in the reader to strive for meaning. Paradoxically, the writer guides the reader, but allows them some flexibility to recreate the text, thereby putting their own unique interpretation on what they have read. ~ Suzy Davies

I would probably have to say that reading fiction - those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I've gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there's always another perspective. ~ Tom Perrotta

Before we go, I gotta know: If mind-reading abilities are real, there's something else I wondered if fiction got right about vampires-"
"Ask me if I sparkle and I'll kill you where you stand," Bones cut him off with utmost seriousness. ~ Jeaniene Frost

Reading fiction as you commute to a job you don't like will make you feel somewhat more fulfilled; being in the right job will make you feel incredible. ~ Laura Vanderkam

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry. ~ Neil Gaiman

The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person's understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling--I am travelling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn't known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug. ~ Penelope Lively

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
~ Ann Patchett

Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow. ~ Jim Thompson

The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people. ~ Tom Rachman

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader. ~ Cynthia Ozick

His chief interest was in reading fiction, then trying to analyze what he had read, fitting it into a larger pattern. ~ Stephen King

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction. ~ Alan Furst

Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure. ~ Peter Morgan

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read. ~ Jim Shepard

I thought it was amazing that I could get a diploma just for reading fiction. It was like being able to major in eating chocolate. (on majoring in literature) ~ Sarah Addison Allen

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn't count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer. ~ Eudora Welty

Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers. ~ Jonathan Yardley

What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job. ~ Charles Stross

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction
so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

Reading fiction - excerpts from National Book Award finalists, winners of the Pen/O. Henry Prize for short stories, or even Amazon bestsellers - has been shown to enhance theory of mind: ~ Margaret Heffernan

I want to be dipped into the world of a novel. I want to be immersed. I travel a lot for my work and my happiest moments are coming back to the hotel late at night, [knowing that a] book I've brought with me [is] waiting for me there. It's like my version of chocolates on a pillow. Fiction is a necessity in my life. It's a strange moment where the world is roiling. People are glued to the news, and rightly so. But what fiction can do is look with nuance and depth at something that's not always looked at that way. There are those studies that say fiction teaches empathy. I feel like, here's a chance. Reading fiction gives me a chance to look into other people and their lives. That's incredibly moving to me. ~ Meg Wolitzer

I love the newspaper. I love reading fiction. ~ Jarod Kintz

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I always wanted to be a writer! But I wanted to do other things, too - be a psychologist, a librarian, et cetera. Now I've decided that reading fiction that features characters who are in those professions will do. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

At the end of my second year I understood something I'd been incubating for several months: that my law studies were of no interest or use to me whatsoever, for my only obsession was reading fiction and, finally, learning how to write it. ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction). ~ Edmund White

I don't remember learning to read, but the first thing I remember reading is a science fiction novel. ~ Vonda N. McIntyre

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I've read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it's the same. ~ Steven Wright

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination. ~ Alice Hoffman

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors
we hope
of your life come from reading fiction. ~ Orson Scott Card

I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind of space. In that space, a version of myself was free to move among places and personages the distinguishing features of which were the feelings they caused to arise in me rather than their seeming appearance, much less their possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sat reading. ~ Gerald Murnane

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy. ~ Jennifer Haigh

So the obvious, then: the liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people's lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble. ~ David Denby

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating. ~ Lily King

In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play. ~ Alice McDermott

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps. ~ Ann Patchett

Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. [pp. 145-146] ~ Siri Hustvedt

Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction. ~ Raymond A. Mar

I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film. ~ Kevin Wilson

Too afraid of plagiarising someone, so I stopped reading fiction in 1981. ~ Robert Rankin

In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day. ~ Frederick Lenz

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.
A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things - whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous. ~ George R R Martin

But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. ~ Alan W. Watts

Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film ... ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I wanted to give you something that would last forever. Something that would surpass the world, that would still be alive and bright even after you passed away. Something beautiful. For your eyes and smile only. But I never found it. All I could give you is words. Words which were as fleeting as the heartbeats that shook my soul whenever you looked my way. ~ F.K. Preston

Power in praise or mountain that move is a nice book bec not only reading it after you read when you put it into practice thenvyou would experience what the author say. ~ Merlin R. Carothers

Are we seriously reading a book together?" I asked in disbelief. "Yep. I need to see what all the fuss is about with these so-called book boyfriends you have. You never know, I might find myself a book girlfriend if I'm lucky." He winked and wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. ~ Rachel Brookes

Reading books would be boring if you lack imagination ... ~ Himmilicious

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye. ~ Bernard Malamud

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books. ~ Elif Batuman

I believe in open government. I've always believed in open government. I don't e-mail, however. And there's a reason: I don't want you reading my personal stuff. ~ George W. Bush

And if she spent rather more time with her nose in a book than was considered ideal at that time (or any other), well, at least that meant she always had a story to tell. ~ Kristen Roupenian

You Never Have a Second Chance for a First Good Impression ~ Doris-Maria Heilmann

Horeb bent over me and ran his hand down my neck, not stopping when his fingers reached my chest.
I jerked backward. "What are you doing?"
His eyes were black and intense. "A little taste before the wedding, Jayden? ~ Kimberley Griffiths Little

I'm not going to be caught unawares again," Haydn argues. "Loving her made me weak. Foolish. And it was totally pointless anyway, because she has only ever loved you. ~ Siobhan Davis

Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private. ~ Jennifer Weiner

She and Kennedy both dove for the power connector; Kennedy reached it first and yanked out the connection as Alex landed on her stomach beside it.

The air settled down until the fine hairs on her arm no longer stood on end. Alex dropped her forehead to the platform and started laughing. "Just like university, isn't it?"

"Almost - nothing's actually blown up yet. ~ G.S. Jennsen

Science-fiction ... can be defined as: Imaginative extrapolation of true natural phenomena, existing now, or likely to exist in the future. ~ Hugo Gernsback

Whenever I'd get howlin' over something, he'd grab my ass up from wherever I was and head straight for the john. Momma said my head would get banged up along the way, but she said it
was probably bein' dunked under water that made me stupid. ~ Cole Alpaugh

Books are what you step on to take you to a higher shelf. The higher your stack of books, the higher the shelf you can reach. Want to reach higher? Stack some more books under your feet! Reading is what brings us to new knowledge. It opens new doors. It helps us understand mysteries. It lets us hear from successful people. Reading is what takes us down the road in our journey. Everything you need for a better future and success has already been written. ~ Jim Rohn

Only because books are better than people, Father. ... Because they are masters who instruct without a rod. If you approach them, they are never asleep; if you are ignorant, they never laugh; if you make mistakes, they never chide. They give to all who ask of them, and never demand payment. ... All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, if God hadn't provided us with the remedy of books. ~ Catherine Jinks

Thus far, I've devoted my entire career to publishing genre short fiction, but I now look forward to applying that same level of curation to finding the best new novels and new authors. ~ John Joseph Adams

He would have died rather quickly to not lose track of his wife in the afterlife. ~ Laura Gentile

Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase. ~ Anne Fadiman

Science is a satisfactory curiosity. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one - reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new - that's my prayer. ~ Sonu Nigam

Remember I Love You Always ~ Zane

A smile is hidden beneath the mustache, it crinkles the corners of his hooded eyes. "I didn't. I have other business in town and I told my friend I would attend to the matter of his son, as he could not do so himself."
"Very kind of you."
"Yes. I have been looking forward to it for quite some time."
Daddy's lemonade is almost gone, he sips it carefully, turning his eyes back to the water. "Looking forward to seeing the lad or to conducting your business?" Daddy is toying with him.
"Both. You see, I had never actually met his son." The glass rests against Daddy's lips, unmoving. Mr. Geyer watches him closely. "But now I have, so I can get on with my," he fixes his own gaze on the water, as though trying to see whatever it is that has transfixed my father, "business. ~ Gwenn Wright

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly. ~ Virginia Woolf

I remember reading Paul Fussell my first year teaching at U of Hawai'i and being like, oh, it has a turn! Why didn't anyone tell me? ~ Juliana Spahr

all texts are at least potentially environmental (and therefore susceptible to ecocriticism or ecologically informed reading) in the sense that all text are literally or imaginatively situated in a place, and in the sense that their authors, consciously or not, inscribe within them a certain relation to their place. ~ Robert Kern

I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge. ~ Ralph Ellison

He strolled through the store to the back room.
Leah sat at a desk, staring at a computer screen that displayed a spreadsheet of some sort. "Give me two minutes," she mumbled, her tone distracted, "then I'll be done."
Seth leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. She wore glasses tonight. He had never seen her do so before and wondered if she needed them for reading and close-up work the way many humans did once they reached their forties. The frames were black, reminding him of those that had been popular in the sixties. Her long hair was pulled back in a slightly disheveled bun. The jeans and blazer she'd apparently changed into before going back to work hugged her beautiful figure.
She had, as Sheldon would say, a real sexy-librarian thing going on that heated Seth's blood. The longer he watched her, the more he wanted to touch her, to peel that blazer off, loosen her hair, and -
"Finally," she announced with a sigh. Closing the file, she removed her glasses and spun the chair around to face him. When she looked at him, her eyebrows flew up. "Hi."
"Hello."
She studied him for a moment. "Something on your mind?"
Aside from a deep desire to strip her naked? ~ Dianne Duvall

It's hard to focus on loud mod to read something like the TV is playing something like Advertising and other boredom stuff and stupid and you are reading an article about topics which are difficult one. ~ Deyth Banger

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them. ~ Lemony Snicket

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. ~ Tom Clancy

A book is not just paper and ink, it's a world full of dreams, imaginations, knowledge, awakening, emboldening and a lot, lot more invaluable treasures. Gift your child a book - introduce them to the joy of reading. ~ Jyoti Arora

I have always maintained that translation is essentially the closest reading one can possibly give a text. The translator cannot ignore "lesser" words, but must consider every jot and tittle. ~ Gregory Rabassa

Things like taking a few dollars out of a paycheck, putting it into savings, and leaving it there. Or doing a few minutes of exercise every day - and not skipping it. Or reading ten pages of an inspiring, educational, life-changing book every day. Or taking a moment to tell someone how much you appreciate them, and doing that consistently, every day, for months and years. Little things that seem insignificant in the doing, yet when compounded over time yield very big results. You could call these "little virtues" or "success habits." I call them simple daily disciplines. Simple productive actions, repeated consistently over time. That, in a nutshell, is the slight edge. ~ Jeff Olson

I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years. ~ Patrick DeWitt

He never had been good at arguing with women; they tapped into pools of resentment over slights that had steeped for years. ~ Martin Cruz Smith

She enjoyed her time alone, reading or riding her horse, Honey, or studying. She did not want to wear fancy dresses or attend parties or experience the frivolity of court life. At least, that was what she always told herself. Now she felt as if she had stepped into the pages of one of her books or strode out of the shadows of her own life for the first time. ~ Cora Carmack