Reader Quotes

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.

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.

I was not a big comic-book 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.

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

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.

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.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

Too many ads that try not to go over the reader's head end up beneath his notice.

I'd been a thriller reader all my life.

In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.

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.

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.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.