Reader Quotations | Page 3

When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the reader longs to be somewhere, not just anywhere, and certainly not nowhere.

I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

The first paragraph of my book must get me my reader. The last paragraph of a chapter must compel my reader to turn the page. The last paragraph of my book must ensure that my reader looks out for my next book.

I'm a known reader. That's what I do with my time.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Music is a good shorthand way to delineate character. If you want to tell the reader a lot about a character in a small space, just tell them what their musical taste is. You'll get their age, their background, whether they're gregarious or a loner.

I was still an avid reader of Mills & Boon romances - on publication day, I used to rush out of work to get to the local book store to grab my favourites before they all disappeared.

I was a very avid reader when I was a child, and I also was a good listener.

I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.

Nick Cardy's work helped define some of the things we see in comics today and take for granted. He broke out of the mold in terms of covers and layout and created a truly interactive experience for the reader that directly points back to his time with the Eisner studio.

I would say if you want to write, write what you care about. I think that's the most important thing. I think if you write what you care about, you stand a better chance of having the reader care about your story.

One hopes that with a book or movie, the reader or the audience will emerge from it thinking. That's the most you can hope for: that you've raised questions that will be there for the audience to think about later.

My conception of my ideal reader has expanded quite a lot as I've matured: Ultimately when I think of my ideal reader, it's someone who's not sitting down with the intention of automatically arguing with the book: somebody who's going to give me enough slack to tell my story.

Never change the URL of your blog. I've done it once, and I lost much of my readership. It took several months to build up the same reader patterns and trust.

No writing comes alive unless the writer sees across his desk a reader, and searches constantly for the word or phrase which will carry the image he wants the reader to see, and arouse the emotion he wants him to feel. Without consciousness of a live reader, what a man writes will die on his page.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

If they come to the library to play educational games and they think libraries are a fun place to be, they will come back again and again their whole life. We've generated a lifelong reader and a lifelong library user.

Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail.

She knew everyone in town and everything that was going on. And she was probably the best proof reader I ever saw in my life. She could spot a comma out of place, a period out of place or a misspelled word. She was just phenomenal.

second-guessing editors. They're obliged to be responsive to their individual communities, and I'm not the one who has to deal directly with reader blow-back.

The only important thing a writer needs is a subject. What the reader hungers after is not accomplished craftsmanship nor even correct grammar but a frank report of the things a writer has done, seen, and thought. None of these can be learned in the library or classroom. They have to be learned in the unsheltered world of living where me get slivers of the truth beaten into their heads.

Reader look, not on his picture but his book.

I don't inflict horrors on readers.

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ...

I have a profound resistance to the idea that a reader could say, 'Oh, well, that's her story.' We should all be interested, no matter where we come from, or who our parents are. It's not my province; it's ours. These questions concern us all.

Fun is what reading a book should be. I had fun writing it. I wanted a reader to be gripped but it shouldn't be a heavy experience.

I get to show the reader the essence of the book without giving anything away.

If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.

I hate to subject it to too much analysis, but one thing I have fun with is the rarity of things being shown from an adult's perspective. When Hobbes is a stuffed toy in one panel and alive in the next, I'm juxtaposing the ""grown-up"" version of reality with Calvin's version, and inviting the reader to decide which is truer. Most of the time, the strip is drawn simply from Calvin's perspective, and Hobbes is as real as anyone.

I believe that if the story is fleshed out and the characters more believable, the reader is more likely to take the journey with them. In addition, the plot can be more complex. My characters are very real to me, and I want each of my characters to be different.

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

Certainly not every reader has liked every one of my books, but I think that's a good thing because it means I'm not repeating myself.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.

If the hairs on my neck stand up while I'm writing, I figure the reader will get the same kind of shock.

He has won every vote who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time.

I'm all about entertaining and keeping a reader on the edge of their seat, so to me, the social issues have to be meaningful and give the book what's really 'at stake,' but ultimately it's not about them - it's always a personal story of everyday people thrust into life-threatening situations and having to perform heroic acts.

I firmly believe that reading is essential to developing writing skills. Reading exposes the reader to the ideas of the authors, not only to varying subject matter content, but also to various styles and techniques for presenting the content.

The purpose of the newsletter is to supply the reader with a reliable supply of seeds made up of proven motivational ideas and strategies that can be immediately put to use.

He doesn't highlight the things he thinks is fact and the things he thinks is fiction, so the reader hasn't any way of knowing.

I welcome the competition. It makes you sharper and better. I don't take any reader for granted.

Such is the endless dilemma of dialect. Not every reader will ever agree with the way that I handle it, no matter how hard I work to keep everything readable. But again it's that balance I have to maintain between keeping it easy and keeping it real, and I know that I'll never please everyone.

I was a big reader of Zane Grey as a young boy, and so horses and the West figured large in my imagination.

Just as I know the usual rules of law enforcement, I also know the exceptions and invoke those frequently. I don't feel a need to bog the reader down with an explanation of why the procedures are realistic, as long as I know that there is, in fact, an explanation.

Narrators of first-person claptrap like this often greet the reader at the door with moist hugs and complaisant kisses. I won't. I will not endear myself.

Maybe storytelling belongs in audio - a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.

I'm so focused on trying to craft the story that I'm in my own little world with it and that process. The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

It is blatantly obvious to even the most casual reader that Islamic terrorists have been, and continue to, cross the porous U.S./Mexico border into the United States.

I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about it.

I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.

I think the vocabulary of the average Sun reader is something like 10,000 words.

I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot. I think I'll always be more of a reader than a writer, definitely. There are sooo many books in the world I haven't read, sometimes I feel as if they're all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, 'Hurry up.'

Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.

Our surveillance team set up and watched this particular group install a card reader and a camera on the ATM machine,

I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells.

It is not the purpose of the ad or commercial to make the reader or listener say, 'My what a clever ad.' It is the purpose of advertising to make the reader say, 'I believe I'll buy one when I'm shopping tomorrow'.

It is not a very difficult task to make what is commonly called an amusing book of travels. Any one who will tell, with a reasonable degree of graphic effect, what he has seen, will not fail to carry the reader with him; for the interest we all feel in personal adventure is, of itself, success.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

I was a terrible reader as a kid. I mean terrible. Super slow and very unfocused. It took me forever to read a book, and I remember being well into high school and still needing my mom to sit down and read aloud to me so I could pass my English tests and such.

it blew me away. We hit every note the reader loved, almost by survey.

I think it is immensely difficult to get the U.S. interested in non-U.S. topics. I don't think this is because the average American reader is disinterested, but more because of publishers playing it safe: if a thriller based in L.A. is a sure winner, why spend money plugging one based in Paris - or Bangkok?

It could be that a company just wants to have one (biometric) reader to lock the door to the server room. Or they want to be sure the staff that's coming in to clean the office every day is coming in on time and not switching cards.

I was a reader before I was a writer - one of those kids who walked home from school with a book up to my face, about to fall in the proverbial pothole because I couldn't see where I was going. And now I'm one of those people whose books are triple shelved and who can't go anywhere without carrying two titles - one that I'm reading and one backup.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

We know our poll drives business in the travel industry. Just the other day I got an e-mail from a reader who was planning her vacation, but before she made a decision she wanted to wait and see who won.

We invite authors to communicate with their readers in a way that hasn't before been possible. Amazon Connect brings the author's message to the reader instead of waiting for the reader to find the message.

You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.

I'm a big reader, so I tend to already know the books when they're adapted into something.

I'm an avid biography reader.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

We determine whether a book is for boys or girls long before the reader gets a chance to decide: we package them with soldiers and ballet slippers on their covers, war machines and glittering gowns.

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

If readers understand that they do not understand what they are reading then they must possess an understanding which is superior to the meaning which caused that misunderstanding.

I've put everything I had and I've given my readers 120 percent, and that's the truth.

Along with responsible newspapers we must have responsible readers.

Novelisation doesn't imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.

There are almost as many kinds of libraries as there are kinds of readers.

Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.

There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense.

The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

The reader should come away convinced from this thesis that you actually did learn something,

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

When a novel has two hundred thousand words, then it is possible for the reader to experience two hundred thousand delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

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

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

What I have always believed in 40 years of experience in the book publishing industry is that you can do what you want as a writer as long as you tell the reader what you are doing. Art is about honesty. My objection is not the use of memoir as literature it certainly can be. My objection is to the lack of honesty.

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

Unless you're a terribly bad writer, you are never going to have too many readers.

An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.

When I read, I'm purely a reader