Reader Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.