Art & Creativity Quote by Nora Roberts

Calling another novelist a "goddess" is fandom language, but in Nora Roberts's mouth it doubles as a quiet manifesto. Roberts isn't just praising Mary Stewart; she's signaling lineage. Stewart, best known for romantic suspense with a lucid, propulsive voice, represents a craft tradition Roberts has helped mainstream and industrialize: stories built to be entered, lived in, and reread without irony.

The key verb here is "slide". Not "start" or "force myself back into" - slide, like stepping into warm water. Roberts frames reading as bodily ease, an almost muscle-memory immersion. That matters coming from a writer often placed on the business end of the literary-business divide. She's asserting that transport isn't a guilty pleasure; it's a calibrated effect produced by rhythm, clarity, and scene-level competence. The mention of an "early" book, read "a dozen times", also rebukes the prestige obsession with novelty. Stewart's work isn't valued because it's new, but because it's reliable in the deepest sense: it still holds.

There's subtext, too, about permission and aspiration. Roberts, a mega-selling author, models a kind of unabashed taste-making: it's okay to revere genre elders, to reread, to want the door to the story to open instantly. In a culture that treats attention as scarce and reading as self-improvement, Roberts makes the case for surrender - not as escapism, but as proof that narrative craft can build a world you return to like home.