Quotes About Readers

You realize you are not alone when you write, and you start to write for the person who will read your words. I think that's a bad thing, but I'm not sure, because I do think of being an author someday, and authors have to commune with their readers.

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

A well-stocked, well-staffed library is like a gardener who plants books, knowledge, and dreams and grows readers, learners, and do-ers.

Theory, as Gayatri Spivak writes, is at best provisional generalization: I am tracking patterns to enable my readers to see them elsewhere or to not see them, and to invent other explanations. I am interested in lines of continuity and in the ellipsis, with its double meaning of what goes without saying and what has not yet been thought.

I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D. December, 1843.

Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great prudency in showing their books to a stranger.

There can be no question to-day of a paper rich enough to allow its contributors to air their personal opinions, and such opinions would be of slight weight with readers who only ask to be kept informed or to be amused, and who suspect every affirmation of being prompted by motives of speculation.

I am agnostic on the shadow market. I went deep into the rabbit hole of global finance, with a legal background and experience on Wall Street, and I decided it wasn't my role to decide--that was for readers.

This story was rejected by two top-flight science-fiction editors for the same reason: "Too hot to handle." "Too dangerous for our book." We'd like to know whether or not the readers of Amazing Stories agree. Drop us a line after you've read

mattered little to Rutherford's avid readers that this supposed Rhodes quotation was a total fabrication, or that every one of her "facts" and "truths" cited above was false.

That'd be just what I need: a rash of car thefts across America, committed by dedicated readers.

In movies, people always "borrow" cars by yanking some wires out from under the dash and connecting them. But the real way it works involves a screwdriver and the starter thingy, under the hood. My personal ethics prevent me from giving you more information. That'd be just what I need: a rash of car thefts across America, committed by dedicated readers.

Don't dismiss the legitimate emotional attraction between readers and literature, Paul.

I've found that in an adult reference book, if it's not a subject I'm interested in, I just can't get into it. I was thinking, what is the place in the library I can go to to get books tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers? Boom. The children's section.

For a professional writer in the Soviet Union, it works this way. First, you have to have something to say - that's the main thing. Second, it's a matter of who publishes you. If your book has real stuff in it, readers will ferret it out, even in a Siberian journal.

'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.

I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.

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.

I do bookstore signings, and it seems to me that I get a variety of men and women, more women than I'd expect, and grown-ups among my readers.

I am persuaded that foolish writers and foolish readers are created for each other; and that fortune provides readers as she does mates for ugly women.

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.

I sit in my little office and I feel like I've got all my readers staring at me.

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.