Reader Quotes
While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.
The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
Creator and reader are partners in the invisible creating something out of nothing, time and time again.
In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.
A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.
When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.
My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.
One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.
The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.
Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.
I used to be a rabid reader, but now it's scripts or nothing - network television is quite relentless, and you can't drop the ball.
I never want to play down to the reader. I think readers are willing to go along if they're intrigued.
Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.
But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.
...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
I would go out into the desert. The desert was my teacher. I didn't know about gurus and wise people-I wasn't a reader.
I came up with new leads for game stories by being observant and clever, by using the many gifts of the English language to intrigue and hook a reader.
The careful reader of the New Testament will find three Christs described: - One who wished to preserve Judaism - one who wished to reform it, and one who built a system of his own
I surrender to the world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.
Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick; I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.
My job as the writer is to fool you. Your job as the reader is to see if you can catch me at it.
The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his sense, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events.
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.
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
A Wired reader told me once, Get a life, which I read from the back of a yacht in the Aegean, while eating fresh sea urchins and drinking terrific Montrachet.
The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
Anybody who claims to read the entire paper every day is either the world's fastest reader or the world's biggest liar.
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.
A reader has to be concerned only with the end result; unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved-but it is my job to know.
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.
I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.
The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.
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.
No new reader, however charitable, could open “Fifty Shades of Grey,” browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth.
I'm very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down.
We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
If readers understand that they do not understand what they are reading then they must possess an understanding which is superior to the meaning which caused that misunderstanding.