In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.
Harlan CobenRead
The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.
Interpretation
Readers play a crucial role in a writer's success by engaging deeply with their stories.
Harlan Coben's quote emphasizes the importance of readers in the literary journey, suggesting that their engagement and enthusiasm for a compelling book allow writers to fulfill their dreams of storytelling. He aspires to create books that captivate readers so much that they prefer staying in to read rather than participating in typical vacation activities.
In practice
During a writer's conference, this quote can be shared to highlight the importance of reader engagement.
In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.
The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.
When you like something and you're pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don't ask why. You just count your blessings and go with it.
No, I don’t live in heartache. I don’t cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. And—like it or not—I still think about her every single day.
Life may not always fall into neat chapters, and you may not always get the satisfying ending you're looking for, but sometimes a good explanation is all the rewrite you need.
The most annoying and full- of- crap thing a writer says is, I write only for myself, I don't care if anyone reads it. A writer without a reader doesn't exist.
I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.
I speak as a man of the world to men of the world; and I say to you, Search the Scriptures! The Bible is the book of all others, to be read at all ages, and in all conditions of human life; not to be read once or twice or thrice through, and then laid aside, but to be read in small portions of one or two chapters every day, and never to be intermitted, unless by some overruling necessity.
My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.'
As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.
I Used the Word 'Negro' and I was Firmly Corrected
In law, as in every other branch of knowledge, the truths given by induction tend to form the premises for new deductions. The lawyers and the judges of successive generations do not repeat for themselves the process of verification any more than most of us repeat the demonstrations of the truths of astronomy or physics.
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