Top 100 Quotes About The Reader
#1. It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, world view and thoughts.
Annie Proulx
#2. To be original is not creating your own idea; it's the essence of the idea in the reader's mind.
Kaela Marooney
#3. My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There's an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there's enough of the present included to lull the reader.
Teju Cole
#4. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the text.
Louise Rosenblatt
#5. Fiction books give the reader a chance to step away from their own reality and into the shoes of the characters, and they show you a world that isn't the one you already know. And sometimes the story's not so different from your own, and it lets you get closer to your own feelings.
Shin Towada
#6. Someone should write a book where the main character slowly falls in love with the reader.
Unknown
#7. I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
Bertrand Russell
#8. I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return 'disposed' to otherness.
Sue Monk Kidd
#9. The first essential in any book is that it have something significant to say --a book that leaves the reader with bigger ideas than when he began reading - that stimulates his thinking, stretches his mind, deepens his feelings. A good book sticks to your ribs.
Rebecca Caudill
#10. As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader's hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.
Alberto Manguel
#11. All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you're selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.
Ramsey Isler
#12. Ending a book with a sequel in such a way that the reader still has faith in the characters and in the writer. That's finesse.
Shandy L. Kurth
#13. As if you're admiring your own psychology and are grasping at every tiny detail, in order to astonish the reader with your insensitivity which is not a part of you. What is this if not the proud challenge of a guilty man to his judge?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#14. I love the box that such a decision puts you in, and I love the interest the reader has in seeing how you negotiate that box: that seemingly hugely narrowed set of options. I also like the way in which it reminds us that we connect to the real world. That our relationship to the world matters.
Jim Shepard
#15. I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, 'You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.'
Maya Angelou
#16. Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts? ... Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity.
Mark Twain
#17. A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.
Gaston Bachelard
#18. Of all the reader questions I get each week, the most common question I get is, 'What are you wearing?'
Katherine Schwarzenegger
#19. We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
Lynne Truss
#20. I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.
Jonathan Kozol
#21. I think of myself as the eyes and ears and voice of the reader.
Robin Givhan
#22. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.
Teju Cole
#23. One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [ ... ] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
Anne Fadiman
#24. Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust
#25. The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.
Bruce Chatwin
#26. Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story ... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.
Stephen King
#27. I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
Salman Rushdie
#28. Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing; the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.
William Safire
#29. The reader [as well as the main character] does not view the work from outside. He too is in the labyrinth.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
#30. Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder, I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.
H.P. Lovecraft
#32. The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#33. One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.
H.P. Lovecraft
#34. When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It's not my business whether people like or dislike it.
Paulo Coelho
#35. Tell a captivating story so smoothly the reader never notices the details.
Sandra Ruttan
#36. It's important to me that the reader goes on a ride with the characters, that you set context enough to know, "Okay, here's where we are in the world. Now we're just going to go inside this person's head, this guy's heart, this woman's ambitions and take it down to very, very small scale."
Don Winslow
#37. You're reading one of those books in which the author is in love with the reader. My life.
Saleem Sharma
#38. Every story reads on multiple levels to convey a greater, more intricate message, and it's the reader's role to tap into that.
Veronika Carnaby
#39. Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.
Hal Zina Bennett
#40. Writing is a gift to both the writer and the reader.
Cheryl Alleway
#41. I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.
Khaled Hosseini
#42. The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
Tobias Wolff
#43. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
John Le Carre
#44. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about
Walter Benjamin
#45. The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.
Anne McCaffrey
#46. I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.
Tom Stoppard
#47. I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.
Patricia Highsmith
#48. You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.
Sarah Hall
#49. Mistakes in a work of fiction by a writer are new discoveries by the reader, that create a new ending for the story.
Kambiz Mostofizadeh
#50. The reader will have noticed that one no longer treats the siege of Troy as a myth. To do so would be to exhibit a most uncritical mind; even the legends of King Arthur have a historic foundation, and those of the Nibelungen are still more probable.
Leonard W. King
#51. Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
Lynn Abbey
#52. I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.
William Least Heat-Moon
#53. The reader has, no doubt, already divined that M. Madeleine is no other than Jean Valjean.
Victor Hugo
#54. To write a novel is to dream a story and write it down on the page. That's why the power of a really good story is one of true magic. Good stories engage the reader utterly in the writer's dream so the dream becomes theirs, too.
Wendy J. Dunn
#55. If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.
Nicole Krauss
#56. The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.
Walter Mosley
#57. I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.
Thom Gunn
#58. The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader's attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.
W. Somerset Maugham
#59. A good story defies the reader's expectations, and in doing so, brings them satisfaction.
Thomas Maltman
#60. Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance
Philip Larkin
#61. While a book has got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the reader it's got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the writer as well.
Terry Pratchett
#62. A good book tells a story, and the reader is either pleased or displeased, intrigued or bored. A great book invites the reader to respond, to argue, to challenge.
Harold S. Kushner
#63. Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.
John O'Hara
#64. What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.
Robert Stone
#66. Stories come alive in the telling. ( ... )They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.
John Connolly
#67. Truth is often a multiplicity of perspectives, and sometimes the more viewpoints and versions of events there are, the closer the reader gets to an overarching truth.
Susan Barker
#68. I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.
Ruth Rendell
#69. In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.
Darin Strauss
#70. A system of education, which would not gratify this disposition in any party, is requisite, in order to obviate the difficulty, and the reader will find a something said to that purpose in perusing this tract.
Joseph Lancaster
#71. My greatest fear is disappointing the reader, so each book has to be better than the one before.
Anthony Horowitz
#72. Whether labeled as such or not, I think every book I've ever written has been, more or less, a romantic suspense. I have always put tremendous effort into making each book a page turner: The harder it is for the reader to put it down, the better I've done my job.
Maggie Shayne
#73. But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in - make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded.
Ted Nelson
#74. CHAPTER XXXIX INTRODUCES SOME RESPECTABLE CHARACTERS WITH WHOM THE READER IS ALREADY ACQUAINTED, AND SHEWS HOW MONKS AND THE JEW LAID THEIR WORTHY HEADS TOGETHER
Charles Dickens
#75. Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader.
Alexander McCall Smith
#76. The ability to engage the reader, to stir feelings deep within their being, is the ultimate goal of erotic fiction. When the reader takes the place of the characters in my story, I have succeeded
Sasha Holden
#78. I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.
George Saunders
#79. A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader's eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.
Bill Barich
#80. Writing in a nuanced way, getting at all the details in a way that remains interesting for the reader, is very difficult.
Carl Hart
#81. I am a Book," said Vinculus, stopping in mid-caper. "I am the Book. It is the task of the Book to bear the words. Which I do. It is the task of the Reader to know what they say.
Susanna Clarke
#82. I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.
Mark Billingham
#83. Mirror the reader to himself and then show him afterward how your product fits his needs.
Raymond Rubicam
#84. If I'm doing my job correctly, I'm presenting a scenario for you as the reader to engage with on your own. I mean that's what the best art is supposed to do.
T.C. Boyle
#85. I'm not sure Kinsey has changed in these first twelve books. I think the reader learns more about her, but from Kinsey's perspective, only three years have passed while the rest of us have been getting older at a much faster clip.
Sue Grafton
#86. A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.
William Gibson
#87. Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#88. The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.
A.W. Tozer
#89. Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through ... That is why people read: to have experiences.
Bonnie Friedman
#90. To be simple, I would say a story has to have a bit of narrative, if only "she says," and then enough of a creation of a different time and place to transport the reader.
Lydia Davis
#91. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them
in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
[From the preface.]
Kurt Vonnegut
#92. The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.
Paul Theroux
#93. A word ( ... ) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever ( ... ) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.
John Fowles
#94. In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.
Pico Iyer
#95. The aim of the scholarly editor is not to produce the the easiest text for the reader, but to get as near as he can to the text of the author.
Frederic G. Kenyon
#96. A successful novel should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.
Stephen King
#97. My style might seem awkward, but I'm only trying to write down the things in the scene that I think the reader should know.
Ernest Hemingway,
#98. Depth is not something the writer puts into a book; it's something the reader takes out of it.
Michael Carroll
#99. I wish my prose to be transparent-I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.
V.S. Naipaul
#100. It is the reader who comes to complete the work and to close, albeit temporarily, the world that it opens, and the reader does this in a different way every time.
Pierre Bayard
