"You can try to reach an audience, but you just write what comes out of you and you just hope that it is accepted. You do not write specifically to a generation"
About this Quote
Uris is puncturing a fantasy that keeps publishing executives, marketing departments, and anxious writers employed: the idea that you can reverse-engineer relevance. His tone is plainspoken, almost stubbornly unromantic. You can "try to reach an audience", he concedes, but the real act of writing is less strategy than extraction: "what comes out of you". That phrase matters. It frames art as something bodily and involuntary, not a product calibrated to demographic taste.
The subtext is a defense of authorial sovereignty in a culture that constantly demands you justify your target market. When Uris says you "hope that it is accepted", he’s acknowledging the humiliating part: the writer controls the work, not the reception. Acceptance is a social negotiation, not an entitlement. That small shrug toward uncertainty is also a quiet rebuke to the era's gatekeepers who wanted novels to behave like commodities.
Context sharpens the point. Uris built blockbuster historical fiction (Exodus, Trinity) that traveled across borders and age groups, often by leaning into big moral narratives rather than trendy stylistic experiments. His claim isn’t that audiences don’t exist; it’s that generations are an unstable fiction to write toward. If you chase "a generation", you’re chasing a moving target, and you end up with a book that smells like its own sales pitch.
What makes the line work is its double realism: it refuses both cynicism ("nothing matters") and pandering ("everything is content"). It argues that the only durable way to meet readers is indirectly, through the pressure of a singular voice, not through the shallow math of relevance.
The subtext is a defense of authorial sovereignty in a culture that constantly demands you justify your target market. When Uris says you "hope that it is accepted", he’s acknowledging the humiliating part: the writer controls the work, not the reception. Acceptance is a social negotiation, not an entitlement. That small shrug toward uncertainty is also a quiet rebuke to the era's gatekeepers who wanted novels to behave like commodities.
Context sharpens the point. Uris built blockbuster historical fiction (Exodus, Trinity) that traveled across borders and age groups, often by leaning into big moral narratives rather than trendy stylistic experiments. His claim isn’t that audiences don’t exist; it’s that generations are an unstable fiction to write toward. If you chase "a generation", you’re chasing a moving target, and you end up with a book that smells like its own sales pitch.
What makes the line work is its double realism: it refuses both cynicism ("nothing matters") and pandering ("everything is content"). It argues that the only durable way to meet readers is indirectly, through the pressure of a singular voice, not through the shallow math of relevance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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