Quotes About Readers

Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'. I trust this passing reflection will not lead anyone to doubt the truth of any part of this story! When I come to describe my life with Clement Makin credulity will be strained but will I hope not fail!

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.

multitud de ineptos literarios salen adelante por la inseguridad intelectual de sus lectores; y montones de plumíferos escriben grandes fárragos de mala -poesía- y viven de ello.

I never forget that a book is not an end in itself. Just like a newspaper or a magazine, a book is a means of communication, which is why I try to grab the reader by the throat and not let go to the end. I don't always succeed, of course; readers tend to be elusive. Who is my reader?

I knew that a zombie book would not particularly appeal to some of my previous readers, but it was artistically compelling, and being able to do a short nonfiction book about poker was really fun and great.

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

Fantasy is more than an escape from the truths of the world and the past: it is an open acknowledgment that those truths are complex and morally difficult. It offers a different route to creating something which will resonate with readers, in a way which resists the erasure of privacy and autonomy which pervades our modern world.

I think that successful writers somehow capture truths that resonate with readers.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross; but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective, that is all that writing is about.

I write very tightly, and my big fear is boring people. I want them to read quickly, stopped in their tracks. I resist indulging myself.

My mission is to figure out the journalistic model for the digital medium, finding out how we get the right stories readers want, at the right time and wherever they want to read them.

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read.

How well your readers connect with and care about this character determines the success of a story. In other words, if they've emotionally gone on the journey with the character, suffered with and experienced the joys and triumphs of the character, as well as learned the lessons and truths, only then have you, the author, done your job.

The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library.

Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.

The ways in which readers encounter and relate to information is dramatically influenced by their education as well as their awareness of the pitfalls relating to the information source.

Readers are increasingly reliant on digital sources for information - and they are increasingly reliant on these sources to be accurate.

The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants. As we saw in Chapter 8, restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests.

Does the book industry suffer from the classical "expert problem" with the buildup of rules of thumb that do not have empirical validity? More than half a million readers later I am discovering that books are not written for book editors.

Shakespeare has surface beneath surface to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with a scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretations of his symbols, and a thousand years hence a world of new readers will possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves do, in these volumes old already.

So," said Sarah, "those are your readers?" "That's most of them, I think." "Don't any intelligent people read you?" "I hope so.

Yet in one way or another all of us - readers and writers alike - are ultimately prisoners of the documents. And the chains are hard to see

I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them