Ideal Reader Quotes

#1. Who is the ideal reader? God only knows.

John Barton

#2. I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

Elizabeth Strout

#3. Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

Joyce Carol Oates

#4. My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

Eudora Welty

#5. My conception of my ideal reader has expanded quite a lot as I've matured: Ultimately when I think of my ideal reader, it's someone who's not sitting down with the intention of automatically arguing with the book: somebody who's going to give me enough slack to tell my story.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#6. The making of art is a profoundly social activity, even if it's one-on-one with some sort of ideal reader who doesn't exist.

August Kleinzahler

#7. Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You're my ideal reader, friend, partner. I'm your fan.

Brook Tesla

#8. each one as it pertains to your ideal reader. If you're not sure, get online and do a little research. Go to Amazon or Goodreads and look up books similar to your remaining idea cards.

Emlyn Chand

#9. The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

Anthony Burgess

#10. The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

Zadie Smith

#11. When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

Darin Strauss

#12. I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

Steve Erickson

#13. Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

John Updike

#14. My ideal reader is somebody who reads my poems out loud.

James Arthur

#15. I've always said that my ideal reader would be someone who after finishing one of my novels would throw it out the window, presumably from an upper floor of an apartment building in New York, and by the time it had landed would be taking the elevator down to retrieve it.

Harry Mathews

#16. You have to try to imagine an ideal reader, who's neither stupid nor able to know what your thoughts are.

John Ashbery

#17. An ideal reader is someone who doesn't know what on Earth you've been doing, who will look at it with absolute freshness and go, 'Oh, so that's what you've been up to.'

Edward Carey

#18. The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.

Paul Auster

#19. I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader ... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice ... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

Kenneth Koch

#20. That ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.

James Joyce

#21. We waste a lot of time and a lot of talent trying to write for the common reader, whom we will never meet. Instead we should be writing for our ideal reader.

Julia Cameron

#22. With humor, it's so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.

Calvin Trillin

#23. I have a couple of dozen books on my reader: ideal for a long trip or an afternoon waiting at the medical clinic. It's flexible.

Barbara Hambly

#24. For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.

Jonathan Evison

#25. Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

Emma Donoghue

#26. My ideal relationship with the reader is that at certain points they will have said, 'I'm finding this quite tough, but I'm going to hang in there,' then at the end they will say, 'Oh God, I'm glad I hung on, it was so worth it.'

Sebastian Faulks

#27. My ideal state as a reader when I'm reading other people is feeling I'm vaguely wasting my time when I'm not reading that novel.

Ian McEwan

#28. I've done 33 Sherlock Holmes stories and bits of them are all right. But the definitive Sherlock Holmes is really in everyone's head. No actor can fit into that category because every reader has his own ideal.

Jeremy Brett

#29. The ideal, it seems to me, is to show things happening and allow the reader to decide what they mean.

John M. Ford

#30. One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective ... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero.

Carolyn Wheat

#31. Put your manuscript down, I'd recommend at least two months. Six would be ideal. You really need to get away from it long enough to change your mindset. Unless you have a photographic memory, this technique will work. You'll transform into the one thing you crave feedback from: a reader.

A.J. Flowers

#32. Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.

Lauren Groff

#33. Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.

Nancy Kress