A Quote by Mary McCarthy

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

Mary McCarthy

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Affair Both Imagination Lonely Novel Only Physically Races Reader Writer

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Mary McCarthy
American - Novelist
June 21, 1912 - October 25, 1989

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

Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

Susan Hill

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

John Fowles

A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.

Maggie Stiefvater

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

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

Anthony Marra

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

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ? there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.

Jim Butcher

Now, as a reader, you shouldn't feel the decisions the writer makes about this DNA, or it would be boring beyond belief. But, as a writer, you're struggling to make these decisions. What should the title be? What's the first line? The point of view? And the struggle with the decisions is because you're trying to figure out WHAT IS THE NOVEL, WHAT IS THE NOVEL?

Mary Kay Zuravleff

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

Ken Liu

I do think some games are works of art, although their medium is visual rather than verbal. Both games and novels allow the reader/player to become a protagonist in the theater of the imagination. Both build worlds. In my opinion, the big difference between game and novel is in narrative structure. Communal role-playing games are open-plan without an end. A novel - at least the kind I write - has a closed structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I like that closed structure, and I feel I can say more with it.

Allegra Goodman

That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.

George Saunders

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

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.

Paul Auster

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

In that way, any world you create will become real. The reader makes it so. The reader becomes implicated in the creation of the world, complicit with the writer. It's the best sort of bond with audience that a writer can hope for, but it demands a great deal of trust on both sides.

Pinckney Benedict

A Quote by Mary McCarthy

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