Reader Quotes

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader

I have always been an obsessive reader - I remember going back and forth to the local library with stacks of books taller than I was.

For a long time, I worked in film and theater, but reading started when I was much younger. I was always a reader.

If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.

After A Perfect Storm came out, I heard from a young reader, who had suffered a similar background as Arizona, that I had helped her to find peace. That was the most amazing thing in the world to me.

Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.

It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.

I don't believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her; the reader may then find the poem difficult.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

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.

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.

More than 3,500 hardcover novels are published each year. Even the most avid reader buys fewer than one a week.

Maybe it's the readers that make a book global.

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

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.

There's no such thing as a good book or a bad book. There's a book that matters to a reader.

I like to hear from my readers, and I like to feel like I'm part of a bigger community of readers and writers.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

Emphasizing and rewarding length over quality results in worse writing and more reader abandonment.

I've worked with many large and small publishers, and nearly all of them love the value that Instapaper provides to their readers.

Instapaper wouldn't be of as much value if it weren't for these mobile and e-reader devices. They give you a separate physical context for reading.

The reader cannot see into your heart. He will know only what you tell him. Make the blind see your words. Make the hard-hearted feel. Make the deaf hear.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.

I just want to write books or give talks which, if I were in the audience or I were the reader, I would appreciate.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

The point is that the reader's journey through our site is a narrative experience. Our job is to make the narrative satisfying.

My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.

If it would not look too much like showing off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is.

A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain.

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept.

But metre itself implies a passion , i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.

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.

The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.

The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

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.

But in all things whether we shall make only a due use of the liberties we have asked, is left entirely to the judicious reader to decide.

[T]he judicious reader ought to know what the chief character in any work of the imagination will naturally perform, according to the situation he is thrown into, as well as doth the author himself.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

Perhaps it's worth saying again: One reader's discomfort should never stand in the way of another reader's survival.

I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.

No matter what you write, it's a matter of putting words in a certain order so that the reader will be interested in what you're writing.

Not one poor reader reported a lot of pleasure reading.

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.