Quotes About The Reader

#1. Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

Umberto Eco

#2. Emily wondered whether Artie would be so carefree if he knew The Book Club was performing grand theft imagination.

S.A. Tawks

#3. You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.

Tim Cahill

#4. Do not tell me what to do, tell me what you do. Do not tell me what is good for me, tell me what is good for you. If, at the same time, you reveal the you in me, if you become a mirror to my inner self, then you have made a reader and a friend.

George A. Sheehan

#5. We love books because they are the greatest escape. That is because our own minds eye is the purest form of virtual reality.

M.R. Mathias

#6. Robert Frost said, No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Kim Addonizio

#7. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

Stephen King

#8. I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.

Claudia Rankine

#9. Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

Bernard Malamud

#10. The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

Billy Collins

#11. I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face.

Franz Kafka

#12. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

Paul Auster

#13. In my books and in romance as a genre, there is a positive, uplifting feeling that leaves the reader with a sense of encouragement and hope for a brighter future - or a brighter present.

Debbie Macomber

#14. Sometimes the reader will decide something else than the author's intent; this is certainly true of attempts to empirically decipher reality.

John M. Ford

#15. The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.

Vladimir Nabokov

#16. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

William Goldman

#17. The character's flaw will shape every other aspect of your book. The flaw is the engine that drives your entire book, from hooking your reader's interest to propelling the plot to its climax - so choose your flaw with care, and make it count.

Libbie Hawker

#18. He tells his reader that writings should be expounded in four senses. The first

Dante Alighieri

#19. Fictional characters exist in only two places, neither of which is on the printed page. They exist, first, in the mind of the writer and, second, in the mind of the reader.

Maren Elwood

#20. The difference between a story and an essay is that the storyteller just wants to entertain the reader, while the essayist has been to graduate school.

Dinty W. Moore

#21. Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

Dani Shapiro

#22. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

George Orwell

#23. He who combines the useful and the pleasing wins out by both instructing and delighting the reader. That is the sort of book that will make money for the publisher, cross the seas, and extend the fame of the author.

Horace

#24. There has to be insight born of hindsight. Otherwise, you're only confessing your sins and asking the reader to forgive you. And that is a complete misuse of the writer's power and unfair to the reader.

Meghan Daum

#25. I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

Stephen King

#26. The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept.

Samuel R. Delany

#27. But in all things whether we shall make only a due use of the liberties we have asked, is left entirely to the judicious reader to decide.

Sarah Fielding

#28. It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination.

S.A. Tawks

#29. CONTENTS Cover About the Book Title Page Colour First Reader Dedication Chapter

Jacqueline Wilson

#30. As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'

Mark Billingham

#31. Good writing is difficult no matter what the reader's age-and children deserve the best.

Aaron Shepard

#32. I didn't like filtering the story through me, saying, 'Reader, you'll be safe with me. While it gets a little dangerous, it'll be okay because, after all, you're with me, because I'm a warm convivial voice. But let's be entertained by this horrible stuff.' I didn't like that.

Michael Winter

#33. The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [ ... ] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

Laura Miller

#34. Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me.

Donald E. Westlake

#35. I'm an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn't matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.

Reid Scott

#36. One of the elements of writing that is most delightful to the engaged reader is the element of surprise. And one of the ways to surprise the reader is to set up an expectation that you then veer away from it at the last moment. A stitch in time saves the penny earned. Or something like that.

Douglas Wilson

#37. Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they'll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.

David Gerrold

#38. Yet if strict criticism should till frown on our method, let candor and good humor forgive what is done to the best of our judgment, for the sake of perspicuity in the story and the delight and entertainment of our candid reader.

Sarah Fielding

#39. Remember Bacon's recommendation to the reader: Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

Mortimer J. Adler

#40. The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic ... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.

Chuck Palahniuk

#41. Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

Akhil Sharma

#42. The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.

Charles Simic

#43. Characters are supposed to have understandable motivations. The reader is supposed to be able to relate to them.

Aaron Starmer

#44. I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four.

Jim Lehrer

#45. Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation - a gnawing familiarity - that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.

Kate Bernheimer

#46. What neither the reader nor Stone would accept was that his self-amputation was as much and act of conceit as it was an act of heroism p 61

Abraham Verghese

#47. ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.

Ambrose Bierce

#48. By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

W.G. Sebald

#49. Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

Ann Patchett

#50. As a reader, I don't feel a story has an obligation to make me happy. I want stories to show me a bigger world than the one I know.

John Green

#51. Reading is a choice. The will to do depends the reader. We may or may not do it but when we kill reading, we kill a purposeful mind. Reading a page of a purposeful book per day is not only a great medicine to the mind but also a powerful antidote to ignorance and mediocrity

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#52. Semicolons ... signal, rather than shout, a relationship ... A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."

George Will

#53. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.

David Foster Wallace

#54. To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

George Saunders

#55. The stories books tell transcend those of the characters inked upon their pages. A book discloses far more about the person who reads it.

Kelseyleigh Reber

#56. The surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definitive, and concrete. The greatest writers - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare - are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

William Strunk Jr.

#57. The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.

Mary Karr

#58. What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.

Richard Flanagan

#59. It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

Harry Mathews

#60. I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.

Taylor Mali

#61. Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regulators and, above all, for investors because they have been prone to abuse by stock manipulators.

Gary Weiss

#62. If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

Italo Calvino

#63. An able reader often discovers in other people's writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.

Michel De Montaigne

#64. Take my hand, Constant Reader, and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there, because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of. Bangor,

Stephen King

#65. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

Henry David Thoreau

#66. There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.

Agnes Repplier

#67. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

Don DeLillo

#68. It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.

Larry Niven

#69. There is nothing better fitted to delight the reader than change of circumstances and varieties of fortune.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#70. Online magazines such as Salon, Slate, and Suck, had already made an elementary discovery: a reader staring into the equivalent of a thirty-watt bulb didn't want to confront thousands of words. The medium required a little extra white space, a sort of oasis for the optic nerve.

James Marcus

#71. The first hit on the nervous system is the one I'm most interested in, because I think if you hit the reader emotionally, the reader can't guarantee the lessons they would like to learn.

Fred D'Aguiar

#72. Be sure to see that the first few pages have the reader on the edge of his seat, unable to put the book down. Most editors only have time to read a few pages before making a decision; make those pages memorable!

Judith Saxton

#73. If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.

Siri Hustvedt

#74. Getting inside your character's head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can't be duplicated in any other medium.

Stewart O'Nan

#75. Take my advice, dear reader, don't talk epigrams even if you have the gift. I know, to those have, the temptation is almost irresistible. But resist it. Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to be somewhat chiselled, as it were, before it will quite fit into an epigram.

Joseph P. Farrell

#76. Noam Chomsky skittles and skithers all over the political landscape to distract the reader's attention from the plain truth.

Sidney Hook

#77. If you can't love or hate your characters then walk away from the keyboard. If they aren't real enough to elicit emotion in you, then they certainly won't elicit emotion in the reader.

Julie Harvey Delcourt

#78. Set fire to cities and nations, to hearts and minds, to the very core of every human spirit. Make sure your words seep into the skin of the reader, leaving trace minerals that sustain the ailing human shell. Make them pay attention. Set fire to the soul. Anything less is an abomination to creation.

Susan Marie

#79. These notes, and that the reader who seeks primarily the pleasures

Alison Croggon

#80. 'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader.

Jonathan Raban

#81. I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#82. A book being read is a transaction between author & reader, a sharing, giving, taking & a reimagining of the author's offering.

Mark Rubinstein

#83. What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

Grace Paley

#84. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

Vladimir Nabokov

#85. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

Charles Olson

#86. It is important to take the seriousness out of things that do not deserve it. Take the seriousness out of it, and the thing loses its power.

S.A. Tawks

#87. A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

Anthony Marra

#88. By changing the way I experienced things, even just involving different details than in reality, I often felt I was betraying the past and playing an unfair game with the reader where he (of course) would ask himself "Did this really happen?"

Sasa Stanisic

#89. I can still remember my mum (a voracious, if not discriminating, reader - I have seen everything from the sublime to the ridiculous by her bed, from Ian Rankin and Elmore Leonard to Barbara Cartland and James Patterson) taking me to get my library card when I was four and not yet at school.

John Niven

#90. Another assumption is labelled 'regression', and here the reader encounters strange diagrams purporting to represent the direction of psychical energy within the mind.

Sigmund Freud

#91. Humor plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat.

E.B. White

#92. I have the most devoted and loyal following. I could probably type up my grocery list and they'd all want to read it. I love that they're willing to let me go wherever I need to go as an author, and they're happy to come along for the ride as the reader.

Jodi Picoult

#93. You can't help putting a lot of yourself into the image and when it's printed the reader can spend hours getting it out.

Francoise Mouly

#94. Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.

Comte De Lautreamont

#95. I've always been an avid reader. If I don't have a book in the car, I'll stop and pick one up just to have something to read. I don't even remember learning to read.

Janis Ian

#96. The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

Nick Earls

#97. Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

Henry David Thoreau

#98. Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable

Friedrich Nietzsche

#99. What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.

Robertson Davies

#100. The subjects which he has chosen, however, are of both historic and dramatic importance, and they have the added value of giving the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which existed in Europe, during the middle ages.

Alexandre Dumas