Book Quote by John Updike

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience…

— Alan Lightman

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

— Bertrand Russell

A book is full of ideas. You just live with what you read for so much longer. A lot of the times, nowadays, with…

— Noah Hawley

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because…

— Mohsin Hamid

Readers want a good book; it's a writer's job to give it to them.

— Sylvia Day

“Life is a book that someone else is reading—and you, a key character—hence the need for continual conflict and resolution. We can't have any…

— Richelle E. Goodrich

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very…

— Steven Erikson

I just love the idea that people disappear into the story for a while. You grab a book, and you want to get back…

— Bernard Beckett

Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point.

— Mason Cooley

You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in…

— David Foster Wallace

In real life, writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books, we're having exciting adventures all the time.

— Ian Rankin

A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go…

— William Golding