A Quote by Joan Didion

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Joan Didion

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Always Dream Listening Reader Writer

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Joan Didion
American - Author
Born: December 5, 1934

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

Joan Didion

We must be forewarned that only rarely does a text easily lend itself to the reader's curiosity... the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between the reader and writer. It is a composition between the reader and the writer in which the reader "rewrites" the text making a determined effort not to betray the author's spirit.

Paulo Freire

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.

Garth Stein

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

Ruth Reichl

I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.

Lorin Stein

It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.

Fay Weldon

I have always been immersed in a world filled with words, earlier as a reader and now, finally, as both a reader and a writer.

Twinkle Khanna

The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen.

Ellen Gilchrist

For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.

Jonathan Evison

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

Julian Barnes

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

Nell Freudenberger

We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

Lynne Truss

Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.

S. E. Hinton

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

P. L. Travers

As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

A Quote by Joan Didion

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