Top 100 Reader No Quotes
#1. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
Walter Benjamin
#2. Now, don't get all weepy on me dear reader.No chin-quivering or nose-sniveling, either. These pages do not need to be all soggy with your mucus.
James Patterson
#3. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Robert Frost
#4. Robert Frost said, No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
Kim Addonizio
#5. [L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch ...
Shirley Jackson
#7. Good writing is difficult no matter what the reader's age-and children deserve the best.
Aaron Shepard
#8. To speak truth, reader, there is no excellent beauty, no accomplished grace, no refinement, without strength as excellent, as complete, as trustworthy.
Charlotte Bronte
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on 'revealed truths') literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it.
Jeffrey Tayler
#12. Never ask about the details of someone's personal life, only the quality. Because if they want you to know, they'll let you know. If they don't want you to know, there is no need to know.
S.A. Tawks
#13. I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.
Jane Austen
#14. I had a perfect confidence, still unshaken, in books. If you read enough you would reach the point of no return. You would cross over and arrive on the safe side. There you would drink the strong waters and become addicted, perhaps demented - but a Reader.
Helen Bevington
#15. Question (from a reader) : Will the Wise Goddess Athena overthrow Zeus and become the ruler of Olympus?
Athena's answer : What an interesting idea ... No, just kidding, Dad. Put away the lightning bolt.
Rick Riordan
#16. This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.
Pamela Paul
#17. Men cannot be nice and kind to a woman and have no affection for them.
S.A. Tawks
#18. No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.
Fisher Ames
#19. If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.
Sarah Fielding
#21. Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.
Anne Lamott
#22. Besides, who ever asked you what you wanted in this world, girl?
The answer to that question, reader, as you well know, was absolutely no one.
Kate DiCamillo
#23. When you were born, did your parents shove a book of world history in your face? No, absolutely not. They gave you what you could handle, and that's exactly how you need to treat the reader.
A.J. Flowers
#24. There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.
Clifton Fadiman
#25. A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.
Jorie Graham
#26. The greatest writers have no purpose but to incite in the minds of each reader the highest and best thought of which they are capable.
Dee Hock
#27. No, I had not read any other comedian's book. Not that I don't enjoy other comedians; I'm just not a reader.
Adam Carolla
#28. I have a profound resistance to the idea that a reader could say, 'Oh, well, that's her story.' We should all be interested, no matter where we come from, or who our parents are. It's not my province; it's ours. These questions concern us all.
Anne Michaels
#29. No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
Aleksandar Hemon
#30. Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
Raoul Vaneigem
#31. The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
Margaret Atwood
#32. You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
Tracy Kidder
#33. No one knows if something works until it actually works. That's why you must always try.
S.A. Tawks
#34. The basic rule [of writing] given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules.
John Steinbeck
#35. The reason I love comics is that they DON'T move, and there is NO sound. As a creator I have to evoke those elements in the drawings and writing, and the reader has to create those elements in their own minds.
Dave McKean
#36. Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.
Neville Cardus
#37. Bloggers intent on self-expression which renders no service to readers don't get read.
Lee Gutkind
#38. The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
Ezra Pound
#39. No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that.
Elizabeth Kostova
#40. The reason I got into acting was not to explore myself. I was a reader, I didn't care about acting. I got into it in college, but I had no interest really in that, in getting up in front of anybody.
Campbell Scott
#41. There really is no difference in the actual writing or plotting. I choose to tell different stories for the younger reader and, of course, I would never put sex and extreme violence in a YA book. But writing for adults and children requires the same care and attention.
Michael Scott
#42. Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
Simone De Beauvoir
#43. A book that is written for the quirky, mischievous, and decidedly irreverent-minded modern reader, Confessions from the Comments Section will appeal to anyone who enjoys a clever, no-holds-barred roast of our contemporary cultural chaos.
Jonathan Kieran
#44. Such is the endless dilemma of dialect. Not every reader will ever agree with the way that I handle it, no matter how hard I work to keep everything readable. But again it's that balance I have to maintain between keeping it easy and keeping it real, and I know that I'll never please everyone.
Susanna Kearsley
#45. Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.
Tom Rachman
#46. Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.
Samuel E. Morison
#47. Because often it is the reader of adventures who saves the world. Because no matter how bad things look, or how rough things get, the reader keeps turning the pages... A reader never walks away from her own story.
R.K. Ryals
#48. The process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
Elizabeth Bowen
#49. Reader, do you think it is a terrible thing to hope when there is really no reason to hope at all? Or is it (as the soldier said about happiness) something that you might just as well do, since,in the end, it really makes no difference to anyone but you?
Kate DiCamillo
#50. there is no such thing as a character in a script, only words on a page. An actor speaks these words of dialogue, and so the reader forms a sense of an actual person, though the character himself is an illusion.
Karl Iglesias
#51. I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.
Jan Neruda
#52. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.
E.B. White
#53. This information is not too difficult to follow, provided that the reader takes an interest in, and has no distaste, for the minutiae of Greek architectural detail...
Rhys Carpenter
#54. No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
John Barton
#55. It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long
ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it.
It's only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement
inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when
there is no enjoyment.
Tim Parks
#56. I have absolutely no idea how this site works. But if you're a reader who's interested in my books, I'll answer any questions you have.
Lucian
#57. Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ... )
Charles Stross
#58. No more can the reader hope to learn virtue merely by reading this book - unless, of course, it is so boring as to demand perseverance!
Dalai Lama XIV
#59. There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere:
Lyndsay Faye
#60. Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.
Gao Xingjian
#61. The fact must never be forgotten that no magazine publisher in the United States could give what it is giving to the reader each month if it were not for the revenue which the advertiser brings the magazine.
Edward Bok
#62. She broke first. "So no, I haven't seen it. I'm more of a reader." Reader, as in ... "And before you ask, no, I'm not a cheesy romance reader.
Riley Mackenzie
#63. Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it's work. Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighbourhood can stand for everything.
Stephen King
#64. READ. You have no business wanting to be a writer unless you are a reader. You should read fantasies and essays, biographies and poetry, fables and fairy tales. Read, read, read, read, read.
Kate DiCamillo
#66. But, reader, there is no comfort in the word "farewell," even if you say it in French. "Farewell" is a word that,in any language, is full of sorrow. It is a word that promises absolutely nothing.
Kate DiCamillo
#67. If you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.
Arthur Brisbane
#68. No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.
Neil Gaiman
#69. You, who reach out to me...
You move me, like no other...
I smile, not because I write...
But because you recognize my unorthodox methods and still wish to embrace me, not only on my good days but on my worst.
((Hugs)) dear reader...dearest new friends!
Eri Nelson
#70. Only a reader can become a writer. Develop a lively intellect and the ability to become interested in anything, no matter how mundane it might seem at first. Look for the story. Develop an eye for detail. Feed your mind and your brain: learn as much as you can about everything you can.
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
#71. The reader will find no figures in this work. The methods which I set forth do not require either constructions or geometrical or mechanical reasonings: but only algebraic operations, subject to a regular and uniform rule of procedure.
Joseph-Louis Lagrange
#73. Don't put your life on hold for someone, or you'll wake up at forty-two with an empty house and a terrifying sense of freedom and no energy or innocence left to enjoy it.
Leah Reader
#74. I have to admit that as a copy editor I agree with the conservatives - my job is to do no harm. But as a person - and as a writer and reader - I am all over the place.
Mary Norris
#75. No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a book differently, and each book works in a different way on each reader.
John Connolly
#76. When I started blogging in 2004, I responded to every comment no matter how nasty the reader was. I was generally polite, believing that these critics would be so charmed by my professionalism that they would see the error of their misogynist ways and swiftly run out to read a bell hooks book. Ha!
Jessica Valenti
#77. Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.
Joy Williams
#78. No reflecting reader can deny that the passing off, on an unsuspecting listener, of noises for words, or symbols, must be classified as a fraud, or that we pass to the other fellow contagious semantic disturbances.
Alfred Korzybski
#79. I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.
Anthony Trollope
#80. Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
James Laughlin
#81. Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
Lawrence Clark Powell
#82. [Roland] Barthes turned the thable on the author, saying no only the a book needs a reader to wake it into life, but that in so doing the reader becomes nothing less that the author, who reveals in the book's hermeneutic possibilities, releases them and so becomes its own creator.
Robert Rowland Smith
#83. Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with "but." If that's what you learned, unlearn it - there's no stronger word at the start. It announces a total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.
William Zinsser
#84. No." Tommy turned and headed toward the door. As he reached it he turned and said, "I'm not fucked." The Sartre reader looked up from his book and said, "We all are. We all are.
Christopher Moore
#85. Dear Reader, he switched human bodies before I made him a vampire, worry no more. It has nothing to do with this story.
Anne Rice
#86. No one is better than anyone else. Some just simply don't fulfil their potential of being the best they possibly can.
S.A. Tawks
#87. I find it truly appalling that there are people in the world like you. You are a disgusting, vile, repulsive, repugnant, foul creature. Because of you, I don't believe in God anymore. No just God would allow someone like you to exist. (Quoting feedback from a reader)
Tucker Max
#88. To become a 'good reader' one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three years on one book [. . .], read only portions of another, devour a third at a single sitting.
Michael Schmidt
#89. INTERVIEWER
Have you ever been envious of another writer?
WODEHOUSE
No, never. I'm really such a voracious reader that I'm only too grateful to get some stuff I can read.
P.G. Wodehouse
#90. I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.
Maggie Stiefvater
#91. if you do not know, reader, what a Fisher Hobbs is, you know nothing about pigs, and deserve no bacon for breakfast.
Charles Kingsley
#92. This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.
Alberto Manguel
#93. Perhaps you laugh too, dear reader; but you know humanity comes out in a variety of strange forms now-a-days, and there is no end to the odd things that humane people will say and do.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#94. I care what my reader thinks. There is no fancy recommendation you can give me that would matter to me as much as Mary Jane from Youngstown writing me a letter. There is not one. Don't need it, don't want it, don't require it, does not fill up my soul. It's about her, not about the rest of it.
Adriana Trigiani
#95. The reader need not be told that John Bull never leaves home without encumbering himself with the greatest possible load of luggage. Our companions were no exception to the rule.
Francis Parkman
#97. Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.
Virginia Woolf
#98. Miss Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, "despises cards. She is a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else.
Jane Austen
#99. Talk away. If you bore us, we have books."
With this invitation Rickie began to relate his history. The reader who has no book will be obliged to listen to it.
E. M. Forster
#100. There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.
Edward Hirsch
