In this post, you will find great Reader Quotes from famous people, such as Jessica Valenti, Gabrielle Zevin, Darin Strauss, David Mitchell, Dani Shapiro. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
I remember that feeling when I was a young reader: finding books that were set in Sydney with Australian characters was incredibly exciting.
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
One of the most important elements of my identity is my identity as a reader. I love to read – really, if I’m honest with myself, it’s practically the only activity that I truly love to do.
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn’t have encouragement, but I didn’t have discouragement, because I don’t think anybody knew what that meant.
A book is a journey: It’s a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader’s experience of a book is going to be different.
When I got out of college in 1991, I had four jobs in four different parts of L.A. There was I Love Juicy, a smoothie bar in Venice, and the Videotheque on Sunset Boulevard, across from the old Tower Records. I was also an intern at the ‘Los Angeles Reader’ in the Miracle Mile and at ‘High Performance’ magazine downtown.
I surrendered to a 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.
Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.
If you are writing a thriller with violence in it, the ending must be violent. You are delivering a promise to your reader.
I’ve been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember.
I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four.
Authors can only soft sell the environment. Create a wonderful story around the environment involving the characters that leaves a lasting impression on the reader’s mind.
I think the key is to give the reader characters they not only care about, but identify with, and to never take away all hope.
The reader’s challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.
Limited points of view let the writer dispense – and the reader gather – information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.
I don’t think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is.
While the spoken word can travel faster, you can’t take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.
I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.
I’m an equal opportunity reader – although I don’t much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.
I don’t believe in writing anything that I don’t know about or haven‘t researched about personally. I like to transport the reader to places, and in order to do that I have to do the research.
As authors, we all have to learn not to be reactive to public statements about our books. It’s really not our business what each reader thinks of them.
In terms of graphic versus prose, I could probably do a lecture on that topic. But what stood out most was the difference in pacing the language and resulting scenes. One illustration can do so much for the reader.
In plotting a book, my goal is to raise the stakes for the characters and, in so doing, keep the reader mesmerized.
There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader… He has to die! I can’t have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.
Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that… the reader is left with an echo of: ‘How much of this was from me?’
Corrupt fantasy points us, or forms us, in a consciousness that can lead to thinking that evil is good and good is evil. In the worst case, this may have long range effects, prompting the reader intuitively, subconsciously, to do evil while thinking they’re doing good.
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.
I think it is immensely difficult to get the U.S. interested in non-U.S. topics. I don’t think this is because the average American reader is disinterested, but more because of publishers playing it safe: if a thriller based in L.A. is a sure winner, why spend money plugging one based in Paris – or Bangkok?
As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.
I’m the slowest reader in the world, because I perform it all in my head.
I’ve mis-signed many a book Rollins or Clemens. My readers quickly become aware. Booksellers will often promote me under both names, and I do plug both at signings. Generally, the fantasy reader has no problem going into the suspense genre. It’s harder for the typical suspense reader to go the other direction.
Every opportunity to practice is a gift to the developing reader. Practice, practice, practice, in every form and medium!
Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it’s a flat experience for the reader.
The one reader I’m trying to please as I write is me, and I’m pretty difficult to please.
The reader is going to imprint on the characters he sees first. He is going to expect to see these people often, to have them figure largely into the story, possibly to care about them. Usually, this will be the protagonist.
I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I’ve never heard of before.
I’m a fan of meeting readers face to face, at reader events, where we’re able to sit down and take some time to talk. Too often, at regular book signings, I meet readers who have traveled six or eight hours to see me, and I’m unable to spend more than a few short minutes chatting with them as I sign books.
The reader need not be told that John Bull never leaves home without encumbering himself with the greatest possible load of luggage. Our companions were no exception to the rule.
This is what I have discovered – and it has been a gift in itself – that books live over and over again in different people‘s minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader’s experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.
However, intention needn’t enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don’t see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others.
I’m a known reader. That’s what I do with my time.
I’d like the reader to decide if he is willing to pay minute sums for content. I’d like the economics of web to be controlled between authors and readers, not advertiser.
My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read.
As I write each new Thorne novel, I’m determined that whatever is happening plot-wise, a new layer of the onion will be peeled away and reveal something about Thorne that is surprising to me as much as anyone else. If I can remain interested in the character, then hopefully the reader will stay interested, too.
Humor is the most precious gift I can give to my reader, a reminder that the world is not such a terribly serious place. There is more than video games and drugs and nuclear threats; there is laughter, and there is hope.
If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.
A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn’t see.
I’m a professional non-fiction reader, that’s what I do. But in my 20s we had our own vampire and witch moment, courtesy of Anne Rice, whose books I read and loved.
I’m hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can’t find the time, there are people who’ve never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.
I had started off, before I ever got an acting job, working at Robert De Niro‘s Tribeca Productions as a reader. I was always interested in that side of the camera.
Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That’s why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It’s the number one qualification.
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
My maternal grandmother – she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I’m not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don’t bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I’m not a book-club style reader. I’m not looking for life lessons or wanting people to think I’m smart because I’m reading a certain book.
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.
A writer without a reader doesn’t exist.
The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.
A good reader or viewer is a person who is alert about her newspaper or news channel. A good reader or viewer will never waste her hard-earned money in watching or reading just anything. She is serious. She will have to think if the news she is consuming is journalism or sycophancy.
It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism.
I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late.
I’m a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J. D. Salinger. I’m that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it’s not really going to make me a better reader.
What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
To make the reader afraid, I had to be afraid.
My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn’t a great crime reader to begin with.
I’ve never believed it’s a fiction writer‘s job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I’m writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters’ identities.
Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.
For me it’s more important that I outline all the facets of a controversial issue and let the reader make up his or her mind. I don’t care if readers change their minds, but I would like readers to ask themselves why their opinion is what it is.
I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.
I’m not a writer. I like being a reader.
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.
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
There is always a temptation to take things for granted, to get lazy, and to presume that the reader knows more than they do.
I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother’s house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.
Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it’s not impossible to know someone who’s like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.
But we talk about issues, we talk about people, we talk about personalities. George is a very good reader of people, and he’s very perceptive about people, and you know, that’s fine.
I’m lucky enough to have two different platforms to perform on – I do stand-up comedy, and I have ‘SNL.’ That’s where I make my most controversial statements because I can explain myself and I’m in control of the microphone, as opposed to Twitter, where it’s in the hands of the reader.
I’m not a big crime reader, but I’m reading Michael Connelly’s ‘The Reversal.’ I’m going back to his novels. I’m also reading Keith Richards’ ‘Life.’ I’m always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late ’60s and early ’70s and the youth culture becoming an industry.
I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‘You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.’
I feel like if you really know the ending right from the beginning, you can add so many subtleties and little things later that will pay off and be more consistent and more rewarding for the reader.
Every reader re-creates a novel – in their own imagination, anyway. It’s only entirely the writer’s when nobody else has read it.
Both types of books – fiction and nonfiction – are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there’s nothing I crave more than a good story!
I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you’re simultaneously the writer and the reader.
Too many writers of fiction don’t give the reader enough credit.
In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.
I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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.
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That’s the main reason I became a writer.
I was a very avid reader when I was a child, and I also was a good listener.
Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don’t think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don’t confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
I was always a keen reader. I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing. I thought that writers were like demi-gods. I don’t know what I thought.
My normal life is, I love to travel and I travel as often as I can. I don’t stay in one place too long. But I’m an avid reader; I guess you could say I’m a bit of a bookworm.
Ultimately, in my mind, that’s what I’m trying to do with my fiction; I’m trying to transport my reader into a different world.
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.
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.
I try not to picture a reader when I’m writing. It’s like trying to make a great table but not picturing anybody sitting at it.
I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.
I’m a voracious reader.
For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that’s become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader’s ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.
The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.
A writer loses possession of her work as soon as it’s reaches its audience. Each reader brings his own experience and prejudice and imagination to the work. Television adaptation just goes one step further, and the novelist has to learn to let go.
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else’s shoes. The reader’s shoes. You’ve got to entertain them.
I’d read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, ‘Please, don’t hurt this guy.’ That’s the key to suspense. It’s easy to disgust a reader. It’s much harder to make them care.
It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader’s opportunities to follow it at every step.
If there is any message in the ‘Wimpy Kid’ books, it is that reading can be and should be fun. As an adult reader, when I see an obvious moral lesson to be taught, I run in the other direction… Kids can sniff out an adult agenda from an early age. I’m writing for entertainment, not to impress literary judges.
It’s not about what you tell the reader, it’s about what you conceal.
Going back to my own past as a reader, I was a big, big reader of romances, particularly as a teenager, the age that my books are aimed at.
I’m not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It’s about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.
I’ve always been a big reader.
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.
What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader’s part.
There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It’s an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.
Characters die all the time. At times, they die amongst a reader’s tears, and at others, amongst the applause, and some, still, in quiet satisfaction.
When I read, I’m purely a reader.
The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.
A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.
I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.
I’m a ‘frotteur,’ someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing.
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.
I think there’s no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.
The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.
I have been an avid reader of ‘Golf Digest’ ever since I started playing this great game.
When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It’s like do-it-yourself dentistry.
No, I had not read any other comedian’s book. Not that I don’t enjoy other comedians; I’m just not a reader.
For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.
Truth is often a multiplicity of perspectives, and sometimes the more viewpoints and versions of events there are, the closer the reader gets to an overarching truth.
To be misunderstood can be the writer’s punishment for having disturbed the reader’s peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
I don’t know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.
One of the best places for a shy person to meet people is in a coffee shop. If you are a reader, bring a book and read it there – that gives a guy something to ask you about. Same goes for sketching, writing, or any hobby you can take with you.
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.
I have one main reader, Miriam Gomez, my wife. She reads everything I write – I have not finished writing something and she is already reading it.
One thing we never did with ‘Bad Company’ was talk down to our reader. And we certainly don’t do that with the new story, ‘Bad Company, First Casualties.’
It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.
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.
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.
Before I’m a writer, I’m definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
You want to feel that your reader does identify with the characters so that there’s a real entry into the story – that some quality speaks to the individual.
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
I’ve read a lot of books on the laws of attraction, and in my home, I have a big book on Muhammad Ali, which I’ve read because he is, like, a hero of mine, but other than that, no, I’m not a big reader.
At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader’s mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.
That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.
I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family – poor, in fact.
The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.
I love reader mail, and I do read it, but I won’t read hate mail.
I was always a big reader, mostly because my parents were.
Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.
Life wasn’t easy growing up; it was frustrating. If I had been a better reader, then that would have come easily, sports would have come easily, everything would have come easily, and I never would have realized that the way you get ahead in life is hard work.
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
I want to earn a reader’s capacity to be moved.
I hadn’t been a particularly precocious reader, but everybody else in my family was.
I’m a very slow reader.
I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
I want to stress the importance of being fair to our readers. You should not impose your own view and prejudice on the readers and try to lead them to a conclusion. As a reader, I understand what a fair report is.
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.
I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.
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.
I was not a big comic-book reader.
Write about what you care about. If you do that, you’re probably going to do your best writing, reach off the page and touch the reader. How are you going to make the reader care if you don’t care yourself?
I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the reader, and I do hope they’re on target.
You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn’t able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.
Well, I was always really mature for my age. I’m an above-age reader. I’m not trying to come off like, ‘I have a high IQ number. My parents gave me the test.’ That’s the way I was, I guess. I am still a kid. I love doing kid activities. I’m such a kid, but when I’m on set, I do like to be professional.
So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you’re free to make the novel as good as you can. You’re allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.
I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.
President Kennedy was a voracious reader and was forever coming up with fascinating bits of information.
It is no use describing a house; the reader will fix the scene in some spot he knows himself.
I think it’s difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They’re embarrassed to have people see them doing it.
I was quite a reader before I became a writer.
I’m not that big of a reader, to be honest.
Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
At the end of the day, it’s about the reader’s attachment to and belief in the magical elements that make or break magical realism.
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’ That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
If you know what you’re talking about, or if you feel that you do, the reader will believe you.
It’s a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
‘The Crimson Petal and the White‘ is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on.
Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader.
I was bar mitzvahed, which was hard. I feel it was the hardest thing I ever had to do; harder than making a movie. It was a lot of studying, you know. I wasn’t a perfect Hebrew reader, and also, they say when you’re reading your Torah portion, you’re not supposed to memorize it. It turned out very tricky.
But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can’t remember ever reading a story without judging it.
In ‘Open City,’ there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in ‘Dubliners.’ That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.
I am a slow reader. I always loved words, which is a strange thing given that I couldn’t actually read them.
Proust is a hero of mine. I read ‘A la recherche’ in one go, and I’m a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.
I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There’s a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.
Each reader has to find her or his own message within a book.
I’m not a great reader, believe it or not. It’s not the vocabulary – my father made me read the dictionary when I was little – but my attention span is poor. Takes me months to read one book.
I really love being a weirdo who writes a lot of different things for a lot of different ages. I have been considering doing a guide on my website so that a reader who liked one of my books could find the other books that he or she might like, because I know some of the books are really different from the rest.
I read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Reader’s Digest… I read some responsible journalism, and from that, I form my own opinions. I also happen to be intelligent, and I question everything.
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.
To be honest, I’m not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
Some readers allow their prejudices to blind them. A good reader knows how to disregard inappropriate responses.
I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.
Nick Cardy’s work helped define some of the things we see in comics today and take for granted. He broke out of the mold in terms of covers and layout and created a truly interactive experience for the reader that directly points back to his time with the Eisner studio.
In college, you’re kind of designing who you want to be. And I wanted to be a big reader.
I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.
My perfect reader doesn’t just read – he or she devours books.
My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it’s like I am sending them a letter.
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.
Not to make him blush, but any story illustrated by Mike Mignola does things that prose alone can’t accomplish. The illustrations create mood and atmosphere, drawing the reader more deeply into the story than words could do on their own.
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.
There are secrets at the heart of every story; there is something that must be uncovered or discovered, both by the reader and by the characters.
I have hardly detained the reader long enough on the subject, to give him a just impression of the stress laid on confession. It is one of the great points to which our attention was constantly directed.
People who have had a stroke and are recovering from it love being read to… especially by someone who is a good reader – it does help them to get better.
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’ I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
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.
When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
I was eccentric, even as a kid. I was an early reader, an early talker. I was very curious in a way that maybe the other kids weren’t. I was a little more outgoing.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There’s more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.
What makes a story is how well it manages to connect with the reader, the visceral effect it has.
As a reader, I tend not to get too much from tales of unrelenting grimness.
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.
Writers don’t always know what they mean – that’s why they write. Their work stands in for them. On the page, the reader meets the authoritative, perfected self; in life, the writer is lumbered with the uncertain, imperfect one.
I read ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race‘ and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer’s ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.
Readers want a story, not a pattern. It’s the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.
I’m a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.
A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.
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.
I think I’m a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I’m not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn’t work and why.
Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there.
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.
I’ve always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
I’d been a thriller reader all my life.
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.
I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to ‘work,’ so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable – because if I feel – if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I’ll hush.
Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.
I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.
I never was a big comic book fan. Obviously I’d heard them growing up from my friends who did read them, but I never was a big comic book reader.
Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.
The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.
A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind’s manageable companion.
First and foremost, I consider myself a storyteller. And I’m endlessly fascinated with people, with what they do and why… and how they feel about it. Which means I’m interested in romance fiction. I was drawn to it, as both a reader and a writer, at the very beginning of my career. It’s my kind of storytelling.
From the reader’s view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
The act of writing… is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that’s the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.
I’m an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn’t matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.
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.
The best way to show an emotion is not through a character’s words, but their smallest expressions – to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to ‘see.’
All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language – on all its levels.
My books are inert as cordwood till a reader’s imagination ignites one and an old flame jumps to life.
I mean, my dad‘s a television producer, and I knew I could get a job as an assistant or a reader with one of his friends, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.
I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.
As much as I love to dive into the action early, I think the hero’s journey is important – the idea that the reader needs to experience the protagonist’s everyday life before you turn that world upside down.
I always like to break out and address the audience. In ‘The History Boys’, for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up.
Even in horror novels where you know most characters aren’t going to make it to the end, it’s crucial to have fully fleshed-out characters. If you don’t do that, the reader doesn’t care what happens to them.
One of my favorite things about the DC Universe, growing up as a reader, was just how big it was and just how many characters and superheroes there were. And how many odd characters there were.
I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem – you are the voice in the poem.
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
Character design, like story design, requires a hook to grab the reader’s attention.
The Bible – it’s sort of the other person in the room. There’s this book, the reader, and the Bible.
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.
All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool.
I’ve always been interested in gadgets and technology and I’ve always been a reader.
I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That’s what makes characters compelling.
I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else.
I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.
You always hope you’ll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.
I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.
As a child, I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon’s ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’
I’m incurably nosey – so naturally I’m a great reader.
A true epilogue is removed from the story in time or space. That’s the reason it is called an ‘Epilogue’; the label serves to alert the reader that the story itself is over, but we are going to now see a distant result or consequence of that story.
Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.
If a work alienates a reader, should that be counted against it? I respect people that love ‘Ulysses,’ for example, but I’m on the other side of the argument. ‘Ulysses’ would be better if it seduced me. But I probably have the minority point of view.
With my pictures, what I hope is that it encourages the reader to imagine more pictures of his own.
I’m interested in Scotland now and then, how it’s changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?
O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.
When I was little, I was a voracious reader, and that really led me to acting as well. I loved being transported into someone else’s life, and that’s what reading provided me. I also really love to entertain people.
Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.
I think ‘accessible‘ just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry.
A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
A savage review is much more entertaining for the reader than an admiring one; the little misanthrope in each of us relishes the rubbishing of someone else.
That said, being dyslexic, I wasn’t a great reader when I was kid.
Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen‘s wonderful – this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic.
What I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the ‘who’ will always matter more than the ‘what.’ It’s fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it’s happening to.
I’m a bookworm. I know with my physical appearance that I don’t look like the typical reader. I’m in Barnes & Noble all the time, and you can look at people that look like they are supposed to be in there. I am in there, pants sagging, hat backwards.
Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.
I’m a lousy reader.
I’m not really a good reader. What I mean is, I think I’m not one of those people who can read a story and analyze it just like that.
One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.
Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.
More than working toward the book’s climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that’s where I find the real satisfaction.
Certainly not every reader has liked every one of my books, but I think that’s a good thing because it means I’m not repeating myself.
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.
I think that ‘Mary Poppins’ needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.
