Success Quote by Sidney Sheldon

The “secret” Sidney Sheldon offers isn’t a trick of plot mechanics; it’s an ethic of attention. He frames success as emotional labor: characters don’t work because they’re cleverly designed, but because the writer has bothered to fully inhabit them. That’s a pointed stance from a novelist known for propulsive, twisty bestsellers. Sheldon quietly rejects the snob’s suspicion that page-turners are engineered products. His claim is that the engine is empathy.

The line “very real to me” does double duty. It’s craft talk and self-defense. By insisting on reality at the level of feeling, Sheldon dodges the debate about realism in circumstance. His heroines might be swept into extravagant conspiracies, but their internal weather has to register as credible. He’s staking his brand on emotional plausibility, not documentary detail.

“I feel everything they feel” also smuggles in a theory of transmission: the writer’s intimacy becomes the reader’s investment. It’s a chain of contagion, not persuasion. Sheldon implies that readers don’t “care” because they’ve been convinced by backstory or moral messaging; they care because the book has a pulse. In a late-20th-century publishing landscape that increasingly treated the novel as entertainment with a high concept, Sheldon’s subtext is almost stubbornly humanist: plot can hook you, but shared sensation keeps you turning pages at 2 a.m. The real boast here is control - not over readers, but over empathy itself.