Reader Quotes
At GQ, there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.
I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be.
This book is not a polemic treatise but a powerful, well-researched account that sensitizes any reader to the ways in which in-difference permits brutality and genocide.
I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
Then again, the name, the associations with a writer's name, can add to the reader's entertainment and pleasure.
For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.
What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.
If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.
Im merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.
My job as the novelist is to present the whole case, then the reader gets to render her verdict.
Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.
Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
Remember, when the writers refer to themselves as 'we' and to the reader as 'you,' this is two against one.
We waste a lot of time and a lot of talent trying to write for the common reader, whom we will never meet. Instead we should be writing for our ideal reader.
Most fiction series are written so that the reader can come in at any point and not feel lost, but if you can start at the beginning, why not?
The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.
The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.
I don't think I'm an unkind person, I don't think my books are unkind, and I don't think my readers are unkind.
An ear will never do you wrong, but I know writers who... most of the language they use is just extracted language from other languages they've read. I am a big-time reader, but I mix and match.
You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.
To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing.
An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.
I am a voracious reader myself. I don't stick to one genre. My only criteria is that it's a good story. I try to bring that to my work because I think people can read your excitement about a story.
I think that the more alien and strange a world or situation is, the more concise you have to be if you want the reader to follow you. It depends on what effect you're looking for.
What I do with the story itself varies of course, but what I want to do is to present the world so that the reader can access it without tripping over the details.
I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.
Forgiveness, reader, is, I think, something very much like hope and love - a powerful, wonderful thing. And a ridiculous thing, too.
He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end, where the reader was assured that the knight and the fair maiden lived together happily ever after.
Besides, who ever asked you what you wanted in this world, girl? The answer to that question, reader, as you well know, was absolutely no one.
For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.
After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.
I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.
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.
I don't think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is.
Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.
I try to be a lot of things for the authors I work with - a careful reader, a helpful friend who also happens to be an experienced writer, a thoughtful editor, and a creative midwife.
I have been an avid reader since my youth. Because I also liked to play tabletop games, I soon felt the desire to make the story narrated in a book or an aspect of that story come alive in a game.
Youve got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what theyre like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.
