Quotes About Readers

Therefore, in the presence of my dear family, in the presence of my Church, and in the presence of the imagined communion of my readers, I have told this story in the hope of forgiveness, and as a promise.

throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces - to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even - as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic - immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow books.

Readers find most flashbacks intolerable. Yet a lot of neophyte writers flash back like mad. Why? No one but the Creator of the Universe knows for sure, but there is a likely answer: they find the conflicts in the "now" of the story produce anxiety in themselves.

But who am I to give lessons? There are no real messages in my fiction. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

People should be interested in books, not their authors.

This book is dedicated to the many readers in this and in other countries who write to me asking: 'What has happened to Tommy and Tuppence? What are they doing now?' My best wishes to you all, and I hope you will enjoy meeting Tommy and Tuppence again, years older, but with spirit unquenched!

Dangerous Visions, which had, almost single-handedly, changed the way readers thought about science fiction. Since Ellison had been at least partially successful

I routinely get e-mails from readers who are disgusted because they feel the race card is played too much and inappropriately. (By the way, can someone put the phrase 'race card' in a cryogenic chamber and never thaw it? It demeans what is still a real struggle).

I respond very well to rules. If there are certain parameters it's much easier to do something really good. Especially when readers know what those are. They know what to expect and then you have to wrong-foot them. That is the trick of crime fiction. And readers come to crime and graphic novels wanting to be entertained, or disgusted.

I am trying to give the best performance possible in 400 pages. I want readers to be scared; I want them to be moved. Entertainment doesn't necessarily mean something trivial, but it does mean people wanting to get to the end of a book.

'Blowback,' as many 'Nation' readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident.

I still like to write, but I mostly dabble for my own enjoyment. I discovered I'm very happy surrounded by books written by other people—and the readers who love them.

To receive the compliments of being a good writer really annoys me, as this has been my perception that a writer as such has no value, it is the readers who invest their thought process, give life to dead words, coupled with their own imagination, thus syncing the content to their tastes and sensibilities, that matter."

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.

We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.

With contemporary poetry having approximately as many fans outside the immediate field as there are devotees of undergoing knee surgery, any sentient, breathing reader who's genuinely interested in poetry... not scared of it... seems a godsend.

I'm always surprised when large numbers of people buy my books.

Readers are always surprised to learn that authors have little or no input regarding the cover art for their books.

Browse Amazon reviews, and you'll see a surprising number of readers who believe one novel can summarize a country, its culture, and its people.

I'm getting a lot of mail from readers, and I'd say 90% seem to be from adults, which amazes me. But then again, I can only write what I imagine I'd like to read, and I'm an adult, so maybe it's not so surprising after all.

One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers into it . . . They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world . . . and a library is a Milky Way of worlds. . . . all imaginative, engrossing books are landscapes into which readers vanish.

I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren't going to stop me.

Publishing companies and a great many authors have missed the opportunity to capitalize on the very real relationships they create with their readers.