Reader Quotations | Page 2

If you do a serious presidential bio, you want to supply the reader with maximum material because otherwise you're offending the reader. A president for many people is a serious thing and they want to know everything.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

I like to be happy when I'm writing. If not, then how will the reader manage?

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.

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 care what my reader thinks. There is no fancy recommendation you can give me that would matter to me as much as Mary Jane from Youngstown writing me a letter. There is not one. Don't need it, don't want it, don't require it, does not fill up my soul. It's about her, not about the rest of it.

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.

We really set out in all our books to say something. Every one is an effort to bring the reader over and show them our theory as to why what we're talking about needs to be talked about.

I didn't know the Green Lantern comics at all. I was a Superman reader.

I am a slow reader. I always loved words, which is a strange thing given that I couldn't actually read them

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

I've always been interested in gadgets and technology and I've always been a reader.

I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.

Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.

I was a big reader as a kid, but it was 'Charlotte's Web' that showed me you could feel as if you were actually living inside a book.

Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I've been really lucky to know her. She's a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer.

I try as hard as I know how to keep my reader relating on a broad level so I don't lead her someplace where she thinks that's the only thing that could cause insecurity.

I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.

I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight.

I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.

It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of readers.

One of the most memorable things I hear is when someone tells me that my books got a reluctant reader to read.

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative. That's what I want as a reader - I want to be confident that the book will do its job.

In the end, what's any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey.

My only job is to write in such a way that the reader gets a new handle on humanity.

In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

I tend to only read comics written by friends or people I've known. And I'm not a great comic reader.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

What I do find enormously gratifying is the reviews my books get from the American press. They are so on the ball compared to anywhere else. It's so satisfying to get a review that conveys the reader understood precisely what I was trying to get at.

At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.

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.

Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it's still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn't want information. He wants a story.

I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return 'disposed' to otherness.

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.

That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.

I really like it when you can step outside of what's come before and find a surprise for the reader and find a surprise for yourself.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

Each reader has to find her or his own message within a book.

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.

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 was a good sight reader and I could sing two or three of these jingles a day. An orchestra would come in for half an hour, and then the singers would come in and knock 'em out, and go on to the next one. I was the voice of Budweiser and Almond Joy.

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.

If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late.

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.

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

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

I'd always loved to read - and come from a family of readers - but I never thought about writing as a career.

Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

The great American food writer M. F. K. Fisher once wrote an essay called 'The Anatomy of a Recipe.' To have a good anatomy, in her view, a recipe should have a sense of logical progression. She despaired of recipes with 'anatomical faults,' where the reader is told to make a cake batter and only then to grease the loaf pans.

I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

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

I think a writer's first job is to entertain, even in novels: to tell a compelling story that pulls the reader along toward an end. At the same time, the best stories are character-driven.

How many times have you opened a book, read the first few sentences and made a snap decision about whether to buy it? When it's your book that's coming under this casual-but-critical scrutiny, you want the reader to be instantly hooked. The way to accomplish this is to create compelling opening sentences.

I've been a Marvel reader since I was just a kid, and I've dreamed of being a Marvel writer for almost as long, so being tapped to officially join the team is truly something.

No scoring system is perfect, but a system that provides for flexibility in scores, if applied by the same taster without prejudice, can quantify different levels of wine quality and provide the reader with one professional's judgment.

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've been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember.

The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.

I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.

The most casual reader of the New Testament can scarcely fail to see the commanding position the resurrection of Christ holds in Christianity. It is the creator of its new and brighter hopes, of its richer and stronger faith, of its deeper and more exalted experience.

Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regulators and, above all, for investors because they have been prone to abuse by stock manipulators.

I don't think I'm an unkind person, I don't think my books are unkind, and I don't think my readers are unkind.

If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.

When I started blogging in 2004, I responded to every comment no matter how nasty the reader was. I was generally polite, believing that these critics would be so charmed by my professionalism that they would see the error of their misogynist ways and swiftly run out to read a bell hooks book. Ha!

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

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.

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.

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written

The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.

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 am not a good cue card reader.

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

I'm not a very creative person, you know? I'm not really an art person. I'm not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

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.

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.

It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.

If the reader cares, I don't think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.

I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.

I cherish my work and all of my readers.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

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.

In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.

A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.

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.

I love reader mail, and I do read it, but I won't read hate mail.

I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places.

I want to make sure that my writing grips the reader from the word 'go.'

For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.

The most annoying and full-of-crap thing a writer says is, 'I write only for myself, I don't care if anyone reads it.' A writer without a reader doesn't exist.

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.