Almost Quote by Azar Nafisi

“Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer, people who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I…

— Claire Dederer

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

— Andrew O'Hagan

“It made them feel, as all good books do, less alone.”

— Jason Fagone

No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to…

— Howard Jacobson

“It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant.…

— Azar Nafisi

I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in…

— Michel Faber

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as…

— Alan Bennett

“Did Jane Austen ruin lives by giving people false expectations about love? Were her heroes just too good to be true? Could a real…

— Victoria Connelly

“Authors are really polite and down to earth, it's just people always have a sarcastic and bully approach towards them. There is nothing wrong…

— Himmilicious

I think the thing I had to be careful about while writing a book was not to say anything that was revealing about other…

— Mike Birbiglia

“That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all. It was…

— Azar Nafisi

“[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's…

— William Deresiewicz