Reader Quotes

With humor, it's so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

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.

I was not a big comic-book reader.

Before, being a model, it was just a job, and I was making fun of it. But today, I take my career more seriously. The fact that a reader may buy an Armani item because she'd seen it on me in a magazine is very important to me. So much so that I intend to launch my own label.

I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.

The reason I got into acting was not to explore myself. I was a reader, I didn't care about acting. I got into it in college, but I had no interest really in that, in getting up in front of anybody.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

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.

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.

Will the reader turn the page?

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.

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.

The bottom line always remains the same: What is the basic humanity of the character? How do I make them resonate with the reader?

Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.

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.

A system of education, which would not gratify this disposition in any party, is requisite, in order to obviate the difficulty, and the reader will find a something said to that purpose in perusing this tract.

When I read, I'm purely a reader.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

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.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.

The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led.

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.

In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

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.