Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.
Let me tell you, 'The Reader' was not glamorous for me in terms of the body-hair maintenance.
President Kennedy was a voracious reader and was forever coming up with fascinating bits of information.
Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.
I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.
When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.
I've had to work hard all my life, and I will never, ever ask a fan or reader to pay for something I've rushed. It's not fair to them, and I will never give them anything except my absolute best.
The fact must never be forgotten that no magazine publisher in the United States could give what it is giving to the reader each month if it were not for the revenue which the advertiser brings the magazine.
The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
I was an avid reader as a child because we didn't have television in Ireland until the mid-'60s.
One of my favorite things about the DC Universe, growing up as a reader, was just how big it was and just how many characters and superheroes there were. And how many odd characters there were.
I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.
I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.
This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.
With my pictures, what I hope is that it encourages the reader to imagine more pictures of his own.
I am a voracious reader, so it's difficult for me to give a list of my favourite authors of all time.
When I was a kid, back in the '40s, I was a voracious comic book reader. And at that time, there was a lot of patriotism in the comics. They were called things like 'All-American Comics' or 'Star-Spangled Comics' or things like that. I decided to do a logo that was a parody of those comics, with 'American' as the first word.
Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.
I think it is immensely difficult to get the U.S. interested in non-U.S. topics. I don't think this is because the average American reader is disinterested, but more because of publishers playing it safe: if a thriller based in L.A. is a sure winner, why spend money plugging one based in Paris - or Bangkok?
I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.
In the end, what's any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey.
So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.
First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago.
If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.
I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.
Reader, persons who have never witnessed a hurricane, such as not unfrequently desolates the sultry climates of the south, can scarcely form an idea of their terrific grandeur. One would think that, not content with laying waste all on land, it must needs sweep the waters of the shallows quite dry to quench its thirst.
I was an avid reader as a child. I am losing that habit now, as my brain congeals into cabbage from wearing too many heels and too much foundation.
If the moral good of fiction stems mainly from a habit of mind it inculcates in the reader, styles are neither good nor bad, and to describe some fictional enterprises as false is pointless.
The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.
I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.
I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.
No, I had not read any other comedian's book. Not that I don't enjoy other comedians; I'm just not a reader.
