A Quote by Norman Rush

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

Norman Rush

Quote Topics

Encouragement Go Kind Live Looking Novel Rare Reader

Quote Author

Norman Rush
American - Writer
Born: October 24, 1933

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'm not entirely sure what a historical novel absolutely has to be, but you don't want a reader who loves a very traditional historical novel to go in with the expectation that this is going to deliver the same kind of reading experience. I think what's contemporary about my book has something to do with how condensed things are.

Danielle Dutton

'Twilight' passed like a fever through the sophisticated reader and the unsophisticated reader alike. People devoured those books in single sittings, over weekends, with a kind of raw intensity that is rare.

Holly Black

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

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

Ruth Rendell

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.

Lev Grossman

I absolutely fell in love with David Cristofanos writing. THE GIRL SHE USED TO BE is that rare novel--its the one youve been looking for when you wander the bookstore aisles, hoping to find something that will grab hold of you and not let go. Eloquent, haunting, and totally enthralling, I was swept in from page one.

Johanna Edwards

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

Basil Bunting

Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.

Rick Riordan

I do like books to be quite an intense experience, and that's the kind of novel I respond to as a reader.

Jed Mercurio

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Dan Chaon

It is rare, with people who are on television or celebrities or actors - it's rare to go to their house for a party and find they cooked. That's rare. Usually people don't cook for their own parties, and they don't buy their own gifts. There are people that do that, and that is a special thing. Those kind of little human touches are nice.

Andy Richter

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

Alan Lightman

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

T. S. Eliot

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.