Top 100 Reader Not Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Therefore I beg you, reader, not to rejoice too greatly if you have read much, but if you have understood much. Nor that you have understood much, but that you have been able to retain it. Otherwise it is of little profit either to read or to understand.
Hugh Of Saint-Victor
#3. If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that.
Julian Barnes
#4. She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.
Robert K. Massie
#5. My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read.
John Edgar Wideman
#6. There's another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#7. You are a reader, not a cheerleader" (from interview at Lilies and Cannonballs Review)
Inigo Garcia Ureta
#8. Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.
Esther Freud
#9. An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.
Brandon Mull
#10. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.
Harold Bloom
#11. Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.
Robertson Davies
#13. Audrey used to pass her some of her story books, but Gayle was no reader, not much or a homemaker neither, though Betty did try giving her a few lessons. I reckon Gayle lived on potato chips and Dr Pepper, and when Okey was home, they just lived on love.
Laurie Graham
#14. Endings are the toughest, harder than beginnings. They must satisfy the expectations you have hopefully generated in your reader - not frustrate them, leave the reader grasping at elusive strings.
Jeffrey Thomas
#15. A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I'm so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.
Cesar Aira
#16. Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. Doctorow
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The funny thing is, I'm not really a big reader, not a big fan of books in the first place.
Macaulay Culkin
#20. I'm not a masochistic reader. If something is just too dense or not enjoyable, even though I'm told it should be good for me, I'll put it down. That said, most of what I read would be considered high-end or good for you, I suppose. But, I also think that reading should be enjoyable.
Josh Radnor
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. [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
#25. The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.
Vladimir Nabokov
#26. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
William Goldman
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. It is not a very difficult task to make what is commonly called an amusing book of travels. Any one who will tell, with a reasonable degree of graphic effect, what he has seen, will not fail to carry the reader with him; for the interest we all feel in personal adventure is, of itself, success.
James Fenimore Cooper
#38. Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the reader's mind.
Corra May Harris
#39. Have you never watched a death, reader? In slow cases like blood loss it is not so much a moment as a stretch of ambiguity - one breath leaves and you wait uncertain for the next: was that the last? One more? Two more? A
Ada Palmer
#40. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.
Elmore Leonard
#41. [T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement
not incitement.
Susan Sontag
#42. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
Anthony Browne
#43. 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
#44. More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.
Billy Collins
#45. I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.
Helen Garner
#46. It is not the task of a reader to please her subjects.
Joyce Maynard
#47. The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
John Ciardi
#48. Asymmetric balance creates greater reader interest. Pleasure derived from observing asymmetrical arrangements lies partly in overcoming resistances, which, consciously or not, the spectator adjusts in his own mind.
Paul Rand
#49. Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind is an arduous task ... In order to dive into those recesses and lay them open to the reader in a striking and intelligible manner, 'tis necessary to assume a certain freedom in writing, not strictly perhaps within the limits prescribed by rules.
Sarah Fielding
#51. 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
#52. I like to be happy when I'm writing. If not, then how will the reader manage?
Kevin Barry
#53. If the writer does not cry, the reader does not cry.
Robert Frost
#54. I do have to earn a living, so I'm conscious of probable reactions from readers, but the most important one is still the awareness that if I'm not enjoying a story, the reader won't either.
Thomas Perry
#55. 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
#56. In the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.
Ellen Glasgow
#57. 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
#58. We'll need you to unlock your desk, sir."
"Sorry," Dreyfuss said. "Not until I've read this form."
"You haven't ... looked at it."
"And I'm a very slow reader. Sometimes I wonder if I'm dyslexic.
Jordan Castillo Price
#60. You will never be a leader in any area of your life if you are not a reader in those areas of life.
Jim George
#61. A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!
M.R. James
#62. 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
#63. If you're not enjoying writing, take a break. Let your passion return. Why should a reader like it if you don't?
Kira Hawke
#64. Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.
Claire Fuller
#65. At the same time, as you know, unless you are a comic book reader, Daredevil is not a known thing.
Avi Arad
#66. 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
#67. The good agent probably is not the reader, he's just the guy who can put together a deal.
Rod Serling
#68. I read the 'Deadpool' series back in the '90s. I'm not, like, a huge comic book reader, per say, though. I'll check out 'Archie' when I'm in the grocery line, but that's about it.
Ryan Reynolds
#69. Right away I think of two books - 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Rebecca' - and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there's also an appealing darkness in both of them.
Alice McDermott
#70. Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it
Franz Wright
#71. What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.
Isaac Asimov
#72. As a reader I like both great characterization and fast moving plots. The challenge is to balance the both and not compromise one for the other.
Tobsha Learner
#73. One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
George R R Martin
#74. If someone knew equally as much about the ins and outs of your home, it would not be your home.
S.A. Tawks
#75. Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved
Milan Kundera
#76. I really rely a lot more on memory. I'm definitely not as good of a sight reader.
John Petrucci
#77. Be the author, not the reader, of your own life.
Paul Gibbons
#78. I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.
Anne Enright
#79. I am not Amish enough to emigrate when my way of life is threatened.
G.R. Reader
#80. Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.
Natalie Goldberg
#81. 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
#82. There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
Robert Graves
#83. I like the fact that second person puts the reader in the story. It makes them, whether they like it or not, complicit in the action.
Rob Roberge
#84. One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.
Beverly Cleary
#85. In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.
Rachel Cusk
#86. And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, just as I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work.
Soren Kierkegaard
#87. The reader is not the customer. The retailer is the customer. So I try to have as much interaction with the retailers as possible because those are my customers.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
#88. I would love to be in 'The Hunger Games.' I'm one of the few people who haven't read the books, because unfortunately, I'm not a big book reader. I do read a lot of scripts and I read the script and I loved it. So, yeah, I'd love to be in 'The Hunger Games.'
Cassi Thomson
#89. There is in Albert Camus' literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.
Aberjhani
#90. Sex is difficult to write about because it's just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information.
Toni Morrison
#91. I don't think anyone wants a reader to be completely lost - certainly not to the point of giving up - but there's something to be said for a book that isn't instantly disposable, that rewards a second reading.
John M. Ford
#92. The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
Mary McCarthy
#93. Often the pronouns I, me, and you are not just harmless but downright helpful. They simulate a conversation, as classic style recommends, and they are gifts to the memory-challenged reader.
Steven Pinker
#94. Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats
#95. When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected.
Walter Darby Bannard
#96. 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
#97. There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets.
Samuel Johnson
#98. The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.
Ronald Frame
#100. If it would not look too much like showing off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is.
Mark Twain
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