Quotes About Readers

Making 'Birdsong,' on the one hand you have how prestigious it is and the reputation of the book, which is something that's an extraordinary piece of work. Sebastian Faulkes is a genius. So you feel that responsibility when you're portraying that character that he's imagined and millions of readers have pictured.

I think of every book as a single entity, and some have later gone on to become a series, often at the request of readers.

I think that artists, at a certain point, can either become defiant and say that the audience is wrong, readers don't get them, and they're going to keep doing it their own way, or they can listen to the criticism - and not necessarily blindly follow the audience's requests and advice.

Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.

Say you're an American novelist, published by the largest publishing house in the world. Their goal is to make as much money from you as possible, to have as many people read your book in as many formats as possible. How can you hope to speak intimately to the numbers of people that represent the book sales required?

Dostoevski does not tell you what to think about his legend, but he requires that you think about it. The novelist was a deeply religious man and he always thought many readers missed that point about him.

What I've come to learn with self-publishing is that if you want to provide readers with something of equal quality, it requires the same amount of time and expense.

Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart.

Funnily enough, the Federal Reserve produced comics about monetary policy, and there is a good comic book guide to microeconomics and macroeconomics out there. But it is not really appropriate for younger readers; it is really aimed at economics students.

If significant amounts of time go by without suspenseful action - which is often most powerfully motivated by backstory - the story loses momentum, and readers lose interest.

I love signing the books; it's so exciting to see my readers in person.

Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers.

One similarity I see between peers and some of the people who read my books is that comics were definitely an outlet for us.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.

Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.

La calidad literaria es inversamente proporcional al número de lectores.

The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

I would like to accept C. H.'s book But it would make my own seem so out of date. Heaven will protect The lay reader.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.

That's the trouble with you readers. You know all the plots.

In many parts of the country outside those metropolitan areas, it's no longer a question of whether readers are getting biased news, it's whether they are getting any news—or at least reliable news.