You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one.

Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read.

"Some stories don't have endings," she says. "In some stories, there aren't even answers."

A really good story does not answer everything. After all, life doesn't answer everything. There remain ambiguities. There remains room for doubt.

" علي عكس ما يحدث في الأفلام، فإن اشارة النهاية" لا تومض في نهاية الكتاب، فعندما أقرأ كتاباً، لا أشعر بأنني أنهيت أي شيء. لذلك فأنا أبدأ كتاباً جديداً

One sign you haven't done enough reading is if you find yourself agreeing with whatever book you read last. At first, it's easy to be swayed by any reasonable argument. Once you've read a lot, you can see that even the best arguments have limitations.

I never know when I start out. You know, I sort of know what the ending is. I know where the characters always end up, and I usually have an image of the last page before I start. I'm a big outliner. But you can't know everything and you have to be open to discovery…

Bowing to the reality of harried lives, Rudwick recognizes that not everyone will read every word of the meaty second section; he even explicitly gives us permission to skip if we get “bogged down in the narrative.” Readers absolutely must not do such a thing; it should be illegal. The publisher should lock up the last 60 pages, and deny access to anyone who doesn't pass a multiple-choice exam inserted into the book between parts two and three.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

A book is not completed till it's read.

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

Any book that can be easily summarized isn't worth reading.

At some point, I stopped and made the following note to myself: I have never finished a story. I'm beginning to see that now. I don't think that there's ever a point where a story or novel is just exactly right. There are only finer and lesser degrees of refinement, and even those are probably subjective. You might think it's perfect for a time, but read it a year or five years later, and you'll see you were mistaken. There's always something I can make better, every time I read one of my stories. Usually there are dozens of somethings. And I once thought this wasn't true, that a story reached a certain point and beyond that point you were only changing things, making them different, not making them better. Indeed, I thought, beyond a point, you risk screwing it all up. I don't think that anymore. You risk screwing it all up right from the start, and no story is ever as perfect as it can be. Perfection is always one or two polishes away from the writer.

Any story that needs a critic to explain it, needs rewriting. A lucidly written, easily understood book is likely to escape critical attention.