A Quote by Tracy Kidder

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

Tracy Kidder

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Believing Own Readers Sense Stop Stories Tend Writers

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Tracy Kidder
American - Author
Born: November 12, 1945

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories...The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.

Elena Ferrante

There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers.

Peter Schjeldahl

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

Salman Rushdie

I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed. There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers. And it's appropriate, because the writer is getting paid and the reader isn't.

Jonathan Santlofer

When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction. Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters' heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel so close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those characters.

Jerome Stern

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

Alice Munro

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Jeffery Deaver

Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections

L.P. Hartley

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

James Lasdun

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

Salman Rushdie

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state. [Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.

Jeanette Winterson

I loved stories as a kid, both being read to me and enjoying on my own. All these stories inspired my imagination, and that's what I have always aimed at doing for my readers: ignite their imaginations.

Tony DiTerlizzi

I'm not sure why, but I seem to be drawn to stories about abuses of power. But I'm also drawn, not so much to victims' stories, as stories that tend to show how power works. Because if you don't understand the criminals, you can't figure out how to stop the crimes.

Alex Gibney

It was quite risky to open the book with one of my quieter stories; I'm kind of trying, I think, to lure readers into a false sense of security and then assault them with a couple really loud, really strange stories.

Kevin Barry

I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers or scientists. It's a trait of human nature that I'm particularly in touch with. So I tend to project it onto my characters.

Andrea Barrett

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

Whitney Balliett

A Quote by Tracy Kidder

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