Reader Quotes

#1. Books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it's full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

John Leonard

#2. Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

Jorge Luis Borges

#3. We've lost that very simple transaction that's so pure, where a reader can say, "I support what you're doing, here's my dollar. I know that you guys are gonna be watchdogs or keep the government accountable, so here's my 50-cent contribution each day." It's just so tidy, and I think so inspiring.

Dave Eggers

#4. The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his 'basic rights.'

Thomas Sowell

#5. 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

#6. My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.

Amy Bloom

#7. Designers like even grayness, which is the worst thing for a reader.

Erik Spiekermann

#8. One of the most important elements of my identity is my identity as a reader. I love to read - really, if I'm honest with myself, it's practically the only activity that I truly love to do.

Gretchen Rubin

#9. I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.

Jean M. Auel

#10. Writing in a nuanced way, getting at all the details in a way that remains interesting for the reader, is very difficult.

Carl Hart

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. I was as eager a writer as I was a reader.

Sherwood Smith

#14. Mirror the reader to himself and then show him afterward how your product fits his needs.

Raymond Rubicam

#15. In The Woman Reader Kate Flint argues that "the study of reading...involves examining a fulcrum: the meeting-place of discourses of subjectivity and socialization." Reading has traditionally been "a prime tool in socialization" and is "centrally bound in with questions of authority".

Ann Romines

#16. The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.

Jacob Bronowski

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. It's just extraordinary to me that the story I write in relative isolation can then connect with so many people, and that the meaning I put into it somehow translates into meaning for a reader. I don't think you can ever expect that.

David Levithan

#20. A novelist who has to defend his creation by telling a reader *But that's what really happened*, is a novelist who has failed.

Samuel G. Freedman

#21. A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

William Gibson

#22. 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

#23. Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.

Antonya Nelson

#24. The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.

A.W. Tozer

#25. The best tool in a writer's arsenal is a reader's imagination.

Tim Campbell

#26. I may be permitted, kind reader, to doubt whether you have ever been enclosed in a glass bottle, unless some vivid dream has teased you with such magical mishaps.

E.T.A. Hoffmann

#27. What you do with your time alive defines you, Reader, but hear me, I beg you, when I say that you are not done being defined.

Daniel Kraus

#28. I'm always reading. Here's where an ebook reader really comes into its own. When I travel, it allows me to carry a huge chunk of my library with me. Usually, when I am writing one project, I am researching the next or beginning to pull together the material for the book after that.

Michael Scott

#29. Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess.

Howard Mittelmark

#30. Did you ever want to be a writer?" "No," she said, and she would have told him. "I only wanted to be a reader.

Ann Patchett

#31. I hadn't been a particularly precocious reader, but everybody else in my family was.

Tom Rachman

#32. I have one main reader, Miriam Gomez, my wife. She reads everything I write - I have not finished writing something and she is already reading it.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#33. The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision.

John Gaddis

#34. I suppose anyone who has ever written a travel book has had the experience of being accosted by a reader with blood in his eye and a lawsuit in his voice.

Ilka Chase

#35. Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through ... That is why people read: to have experiences.

Bonnie Friedman

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes; and, to carry the analogy a degree farther, reading is no more a virtue than breathing.

Edith Wharton

#40. When I'm writing, I don't really have much other guide than, 'As a reader, how would I respond to this?'

Ann Leckie

#41. 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

#42. Every reader of your ad is interested, else he would not be a reader. You are dealing with someone willing to listen. Then do your level best. That reader, if you lose him now, May never again be a reader

Claude C. Hopkins

#43. Every reader his or her book.
Every book its reader.

S.R. Ranganathan

#44. Lolita... is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.

Orville Prescott

#45. 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

#46. Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.

Glen Cook

#47. Forgive my asking you to use your mind. It is a thing which no novelist should expect of his reader ...

Owen Wister

#48. An obsessed reader figured that 'Armistead Maupin' was an anagram for 'is a man I dreamt up'.

Christopher Bram

#49. Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' - which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was - losing myself in these imaginary worlds.

Stewart O'Nan

#50. When a long book succeeds, the writer and reader are not just having an affair; they are married.

Stephen King

#51. I'm just writing what I know. I've never been much of a reader of fantasy, and I think you write what you, personally, enjoy reading.

Sarah Dessen

#52. Today is a reader; Tomorrow is a leader

Margaret Fuller

#53. 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

#54. I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.

James Laughlin

#55. A successful novel should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.

Stephen King

#56. 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,

#57. Dear reader, true religion is not gloomy.

Fanny Fern

#58. As John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, "It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer." All

Bill Bryson

#59. When you get to the point where you know the material so well and you know the character so well that you can just sort of play off of whoever your reader is - that's the best feeling at an audition.

Laura Spencer

#60. An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life.

Herve Le Tellier

#61. Reading was such an enrichment of my life. And it was that pleasure that I had as a very young reader probably that is the origin of my vocation.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#62. In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now ?

Dana Gioia

#63. I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.'

Margaret Atwood

#64. 'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

Junot Diaz

#65. I don't choose between my house phone and my mobile. I don't choose between my laptop and my notebook. And I don't intend to choose between my e-reader and my bookshelf.

Sara Sheridan

#66. Lucky are you, reader, if you happen not to be of that sex to whom it is forbidden all good things; to whom liberty is denied; to whom almost all virtues are denied; lucky are you if you are one of those who can be wise without its being a crime.

Marie De Gournay

#67. I love reader mail, and I do read it, but I won't read hate mail.

Ayelet Waldman

#68. Don't try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience - every reader is a different person.

William Zinsser

#69. And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever.

Franz Kafka

#70. It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.

Johannes Kepler

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

Joyce Carol Oates

#72. Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.

T.E.D. Klein

#73. I was an obsessive fantasy reader from the time I could read at all.

Margaret Stohl

#74. I really like it when you can step outside of what's come before and find a surprise for the reader and find a surprise for yourself.

Dave Gibbons

#75. Certainly, as a reader, I had always discovered the deepest truths in fiction; it was through reading novels that I learned about the world, a world not only of fact but of imagination and emotion.

Alice Hoffman

#76. The writer has the advantage of a medium that can be contemplated many times over on the pages of a book or a magazine. The words lie on the page and the writer has an extended opportunity to imprint on his reader every meaning and nuance distilled from experience.

Bienvenido Lumbera

#77. Your story should open as a door to the reader, where the action has already begun and they have to run to keep up.

Davis Bunn

#78. I'm a lousy reader.

Broderick Crawford

#79. I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

M.J. Rose

#80. I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative ... A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

E.L. Doctorow

#81. I'm a little bit of a news political junkie, a little bit of a reader of history.

David Mandel

#82. You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.

John Updike

#83. I was first a reader and without readers what would be the point in writing. For those of you who love a good story, thank you for being willing to read what we writerly folk create.

Michelle Dennis Evans

#84. It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.

Kate Bernheimer

#85. I think what makes good writing is intimacy - putting the reader inside the character's head. Many books are bad because they're merely guidebooks for sightseers.

Raymond Bolton

#86. A presentation copy, reader,-if haply you are yet innocent of such favours-is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author.

Charles Lamb

#87. The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished
it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#88. One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.

Mortimer Adler

#89. Often, proposal writers fall into the trap of talking about how great their firm is and forgetting to identify how it impacts or intersects with the reader.

Matt Handal

#90. Writing is a conduit. It opens up a passageway into the past. Not just for the writer, but for the reader too. Both readers and writer are linked by the commonality of human experience.

Lang Leav

#91. But I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.

Madeleine L'Engle

#92. For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.

Alan Furst

#93. I didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.

Rachel Kushner

#94. The novel ... creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

V.S. Pritchett

#95. The text-book is rare that stimulates its reader to ask, Why is this so? Or, How does this connect with what has been read elsewhere?

J. Norman Collie

#96. The heroine might be unsure. And the reader. But I don't think the author should be.

Paul Park

#97. Before the reader turns his back upon the Grand Basin once for all, I should like to put a name upon the glacier it contains - since it is the fashion to name glaciers.

Hudson Stuck

#98. A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.

Karen Traviss

#99. I confess that I am a messy, disorganized and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first 40 pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more.

Isabel Allende

#100. That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.

Richard Ford