Top 100 To The Reader Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
Joshua Foer
#9. As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.
Nicholas Meyer
#10. My job is to allow the character to live and breathe - and become as real to the reader as he or she is to me.
Francine Rivers
#11. Richard Christian Matheson is a master of compression. He knows how to catch a moment in words and convey it straight to the reader's heart.
Clive Barker
#12. Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#13. Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I think that's how I tap into it.
Kristan Higgins
#14. I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.
Sidney Sheldon
#15. What's that dreadful phrase? Reader-friendly? It isn't reader friendly; it's saying to the reader, "I bet you can't take this, and if you can you're the kind of reader I want and you'll stay with me. If you can't take it, I don't want you to read me anyway.
Paul West
#16. (Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)
Tom Robbins
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author's doing all the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and white.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#21. The labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
Agnes Repplier
#22. 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
#23. To successfully tell the story, we had to be willing to let people see us as we really were; with all our weaknesses, fears, and imperfections. There are important lessons we learned from the experience that we would not have adequately relayed to the reader if we had been less bold." ~ Duane
Duane & Selena Pannell
#25. I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader.
Karin Slaughter
#26. The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.
Aberjhani
#27. If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.
Stan Lee
#28. To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.
Alan Joshua
#29. All we can do is write, but its up to the reader to decide if we wrote masterpieces or empty silliness, and there is nothing you can do till another reader says different.
Uma Nnenna
#30. A story without an ending is an unbearable itch to the reader.
K.J. Charles
#31. If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
George Saunders
#32. Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Willa Cather
#33. Then again, the name, the associations with a writer's name, can add to the reader's entertainment and pleasure.
Jonathan Ames
#34. Poetry is best written with the growl and the gut. The heart and the head should be the realm to the reader.
Jeremy Young
#35. It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.
Akhil Sharma
#36. 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
#37. I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.
Mary Wesley
#38. My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.
Camille Paglia
#39. Content is anything that adds value to the reader's life.
Avinash Kaushik
#40. Because reading is a selfish activity, writing must be unselfish, a gift to the reader.
Oscar Patton
#41. Never write anything that does not move you or give you pleasure. Emotion is then transferred from the writer to the reader.
Massimo Marino
#42. Very deep. You should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you.
Douglas Adams
#43. That's a way to increase the realism to the reader, if you want to get technical - you leave it [character] vague and you let the reader fill in the blanks with their imagination.
Nicholas Sparks
#44. Mr. Wellins said it didn't matter what a writer intended his work to mean, that the only thing that mattered was what it meant to the reader, and I guess I could see his point, but I still thought he was a creepy old pervert.
Anonymous
#45. Branding is your promise to the reader. It's the words, images and emotions that surround your work and the way readers think of you.
Joanna Penn
#46. When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author
then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.
Doris Lessing
#47. In writing, the connection between storyteller and audience is just as important. By using some subtle devices, a narrator can reach out to the reader and say, 'We're in this together.'
Constance Hale
#48. If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is.
Patrick Rothfuss
#49. Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life
James N. Frey
#50. I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy.
Charles Darwin
#51. An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.
Nicolas Chamfort
#52. Remember, when the writers refer to themselves as 'we' and to the reader as 'you,' this is two against one.
Judith Rascoe
#53. Minimalism has a connotation of being reductive, and not in the best way. 'Brevetist' is a better term. I'm trying to be as concise as possible and still getting across to the reader. When information is delivered in that way, it is very satisfying to me.
Susan Minot
#54. This skipping is another important point. It should be done whenever a proof seems too hard or whenever a theorem or a whole paragraph does not appeal to the reader. In most cases he will be able to go on and later he may return to the parts which he skipped.
Emil Artin
#55. Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.
Tenaya Jayne
#56. Multitudes of words are neither an argument of clear ideas in the writer, nor a proper means of conveying clear notions to the reader.
Adam Clarke
#57. Every story makes a promise to the reader. Actually, two promises, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think.
Nancy Kress
#58. Books of quotation are not only of importance to the reader for what they contain of matured thought, but also for what they suggest. Our brains receive the spark and become luminous, like inflammable material by the contact of flint and steel.
Maturin Murray Ballou
#59. Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.
Janet Flanner
#60. The best headlines are those that appeal to the reader's self-interest, that is, headlines based on reader benefits. They offer readers something they want - and get from you.
John Caples
#61. The subject, however various and important, has already been so frequently, so ably, and so successfully discussed, that it is now grown familiar to the reader, and difficult to the writer.
Edward Gibbon
#62. The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to give it memory value.
Morris Hite
#63. Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
A.E. Housman
#64. We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action, so I'm going to leave it to the reader.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#65. I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
Aleksandar Hemon
#66. You can't be up the reader's ass, as many a writer I think is - cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that's not loving the reader in the right way. That's toadying to the reader.
Martin Amis
#67. Whether your characters journey daily to a distant moon or just down the street to the corner bar, what matters to the reader is the singular event that distinguishes one such voyage from all the others and makes for a story worth telling.
Peter Selgin
#68. I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.
Neil Gaiman
#69. I believe young children in particular enjoy witnessing the survival of youthful protagonists against terrible odds. I think it's gratifying to the reader when you give young characters that kind of agency.
Robert Paul Weston
#70. Sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader - emotion without vivid evidence.
Mary Karr
#71. If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.
Joyce Carol Oates
#72. In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there's some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it's mediated by a kind of text - there's an electricity about it.
David Foster Wallace
#73. I never want to play down to the reader. I think readers are willing to go along if they're intrigued.
Joseph Boyden
#74. I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
David Foster Wallace
#75. The best writing reflects the author's ideas and communicates them clearly to the reader.
Steve Dunham
#76. And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
Paul Auster
#77. In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."
Paul Auster
#78. If words come alive on the page, the writer succeeds in connecting to the reader.
Aman Jassal
#79. That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.
Alice Hoffman
#80. Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it's worth knowing about them. That's challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.
Susan Orlean
#81. It's up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based on everything the know about life and emotions.
Jay Asher
#83. According to Ruth, Nabokov changed the way she read and wrote: "He used words to paint pictures. Even today, when I read, I notice with pleasure when an author has chosen a particular word, a particular place, for the picture it will convey to the reader." Ruth remembers
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#84. Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.
Marcel Proust
#85. The fact of the matter is I always have a really high sense of responsibility to the reader, whether it's a few readers that I get or a lot of readers, which I was lucky enough to get with 'Olive.' I feel responsible to them, to deliver something as truthful and straight as I can.
Elizabeth Strout
#86. For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.
Meghan Daum
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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