Reader Quotes

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

I read while the kids play. I can see them from the kitchen window. And I'm a fast reader.

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.

No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

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.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

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.

The Bible - it's sort of the other person in the room. There's this book, the reader, and the Bible.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.

Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

I want a kiss to be so believable it gives the reader shivers.

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.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

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.

The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.

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.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.

I'm an avid biography reader.