Top 100 Writer And Reader Quotes
#1. To say "I" is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other.
Alberto Manguel
#2. 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
#3. Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#4. 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
#5. For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.
Norman Lock
#6. Reading is a collaboration between the writer and reader. Both parties must keep that in mind when dealing with a work of fiction."
{Guy Gavriel Kay}
Guy Gavriel Kay
#7. The transaction between writer and reader is human civilization's most dazzling feat, yet it's such a part of our lives that it's, well, prosaic.
Patricia T. O'Conner
#8. I love telling stories. I love the intimacy between the writer and reader. When you write sketches it's over in two minutes. When you write a book the characters have to have a bit of emotional depth.
David Walliams
#9. A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.
Steven Erikson
#10. For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Mary McCarthy
#11. Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.
Steven Pinker
#12. Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.
John Hodgman
#13. In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.
Howard Gordon
#14. Words build a bridge between the imaginations of writer and reader, creating something unique between them.
Jane Lindskold
#15. For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.
Jonathan Evison
#16. Reading is, at its best, not an escape; it is genuine experience. A novel is not a monologue, but a conversation, a collaboration between writer and reader, an invaluable exchange of human conditions.
Jonathan Evison
#17. What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
Will Self
#18. More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.
Randall Jarrell
#19. Any change that shortens the path between a writer and reader is a win for the book world.
K.J. Kilton
#20. The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
#21. Stories are living things, creatures that move and grow in the imaginations of writer and reader. They must be solid and touchable just like the land, and must have fluid half-known depths just like the sea.
David Almond
#22. 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
#23. When a long book succeeds, the writer and reader are not just having an affair; they are married.
Stephen King
#24. The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
#25. Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
Augusten Burroughs
#26. Risk is important to me as a writer, reader, and editor. I love stories that take a premise or style that seems unlikely to succeed, whose first paragraphs risk a raised eyebrow or groan, and whose last paragraphs are then all that much sweeter a triumph. Basically, I love being proved wrong.
Caitlin Horrocks
#27. Fictional characters exist in only two places, neither of which is on the printed page. They exist, first, in the mind of the writer and, second, in the mind of the reader.
Maren Elwood
#28. 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
#29. As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'
Mark Billingham
#30. A writer draws a road map where readers walks with their love, joy, anger, tears, and dismay. Every story, every poem, has different meanings for every reader.
Debasish Mridha
#31. To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.
George Saunders
#32. 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
#33. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.
Don DeLillo
#34. Because books are alive. They are more alive than you and me. Books live forever. They live on in their own jackets. They live on in their reader's memory. They live on in their writer's minds.
Susan Shultz
#35. The job of a fiction writer is to engage the reader and rip them from reality.
Tom M. Wiseman
#36. As a writer of criticism, the consumer thing is the least interesting thing, but as a critic, the single worst thing you can do is send a reader to waste time and money on something - even if it's something you personally love. You have to indicate the reasons why you love it and they'll hate it.
Jonathan Gold
#37. I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.
Stephenie Meyer
#38. I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.
George Saunders
#39. A writer's thoughts can act as an Aladdin's lamp, which can enlighten and open the mind of a reader, by showing opportunities and beauties of life.
Debasish Mridha
#40. As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime," he said. "I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life.
Philip Levine
#42. A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.
Arthur Koestler
#43. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident ... Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
#44. A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#45. A good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.
Roland Smith
#46. The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.
That's what my writing was. Messages in bottles.
Patricia Duncker
#47. A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.
John Green
#48. The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.
Ruth Ozeki
#49. 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
#50. Why did I become a writer? Because I grew up in New York City, and there were seven newspapers in New York City, and my family was an inveterate reader of newspapers and I loved holding a paper in my hand. It was something sacred.
H. G. Bissinger
#51. A writer is nothing without a reader; a reader is nothing without a writer.
Anthony Liccione
#52. Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.
John M. Ford
#53. 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
#54. I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
Jon Krakauer
#55. Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.
Terry Pratchett
#56. 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
#57. The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
Simon Schama
#58. Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.
Andrew O'Hagan
#59. 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
#60. The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.
Iris Johansen
#61. 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
#62. I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
John Green
#63. What you produce as a writer is art. A voice that opens a vein and leaves the reader lapping at the blood that's been drawn.
H.N. Sieverding
#64. The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.
Cynthia Ogren
#65. The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'
Ayelet Waldman
#66. The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.
Paul Auster
#67. The purpose of a writer is to show the beauty and tragedy of life in the reader's own mirror.
Debasish Mridha
#68. That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.
Charles Caleb Colton
#69. A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.
Maggie Stiefvater
#70. Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.
William Zinsser
#71. 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
#72. Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
Dani Shapiro
#73. I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.
Andrew Clements
#74. Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
Paul Auster
#75. 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
#76. Every time someone opens a book and begins to read, a synergy between the reader and the writer occurs across time and space.
Jeanette O'Hagan
#77. The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.
Patricia Duncker
#78. As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
George Saunders
#79. You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.
Jean M. Auel
#80. What reader or dreamer doesn't imagine the romantic life of a writer, who lingers between the desk and the fridge in the morning and in the evening attends cocktail parties thrown by nouveaux riches and the society ladies who hardly ever have the time to read?
Rawi Hage
#81. You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.
Nancy Kress
#82. A writer's uniqueness glows and transforms the heart and the soul of a reader.
A.D. Posey
#83. 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
#84. Every writer is first a reader, and what we read matters.
Sara Ahmed
#85. Writing a story bends time and warps reality. It gives the writer prior knowledge in the reader's future...
RO Smit
#86. It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.
Gary Oldman
#87. The interaction between author and reader is the most intimate in the world of art. The reader's imagination shares and completes the writer's.
Mark Rubinstein
#88. As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
E.B. White
#89. What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#90. Then again, the name, the associations with a writer's name, can add to the reader's entertainment and pleasure.
Jonathan Ames
#91. I spent many years in grad school in English, so I've read a lot in a variety of genres. But adventure fantasy is my bread and butter as a reader, and probably always will be. So it's only natural that I came to that genre as a writer.
Saladin Ahmed
#92. My priority as a writer is that my reader's entertainment comes first, second, and last.
B.J. Kibble
#93. I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot. I think I'll always be more of a reader than a writer, definitely. There are sooo many books in the world I haven't read, sometimes I feel as if they're all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, 'Hurry up.'
Helen Oyeyemi
#94. I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells.
Michel Faber
#95. There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.
Eudora Welty
#96. Serving the reader by working cooperatively with the writer? Sometimes throwing 'the rules' out the window? Clearing the decks of pet peeves, mythical prohibitions and intractability? That is subversive. And welcome.
Craig Lancaster
#97. And a more foolish notion can scarcely be imagined, it being obvious that the reader is only informed of what the writer wishes him to know, and is thus seduced into believing almost anything.
Iain Pears
#98. Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.
Joseph Addison
#99. Libraries made me - as a reader, as a writer, and as a human being.
Laurie R. King
#100. Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer ... and on the reader.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
