Quotes About Readers

Sales were lukewarm. Back home there was no freedom, but there were readers. Here there was freedom enough, but readers were missing.

The Internet offers authors and their readers a new diversity of opportunities and freedom.

If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.

As a writer you have as many bosses as you have readers...though in the end, you must answer to yourself.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow.

Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books.

I have started a new blog W.A.R.(Writers Amongst Readers) for all those writing or reading books. Quotes, excerpts, comments from the world's greatest writers. See robinhawdonblog

Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.

It's interesting when you're doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there.... My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they've been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it.

Readers came and went, only the books stayed forever.

You don't have anything new to say, Ethelred, but you carry on writing crime novels. I mean, it's fine. Your readers don't like new stuff. It frightens the shit out of them.

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

I suspect that Jane Austen's practice of denying herself the aid of figurative language which, as much as any of her other habits of expression, repelled Charlotte Brontë, and has alienated other readers, conscious with a dissatisfaction with her style that they have not cared to analyse.

We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love--a connection between things. This arcane bit of knowledge is respoken everyday into the ears of readers of great books, and also appears to perpetually slip under a carpet, utterly forgotten.

Readers are the leaders others follow.

The writing of this book serves as a kind of confession. You, the readers, will be my confidants. I'm going to tell you all my secrets. Things I've never told anybody. Things I don't want anybody to know! I don't want you to breathe a word of what you find out in this book. Keep everything under your hat! Wait a minute, wait a minute…that might not work. I'm not in a confessional booth, and a lot of you are probably not priests. This is a book!

It is the task of Revelation, in part, to convince its hearers and readers that faithful discipleship has both costs and rewards.

Wherever my story takes me, however dark and difficult the theme, there is always some hope and redemption, not because readers like happy endings, but because I am an optimist at heart. I know the sun will rise in the morning, that there is a light at the end of every tunnel.

History was becoming, as he would soon inform readers of the "Outline," 'a race between education and catastrophe.' The teaching of nationalistic history had fuelled the conflagration -- in Germany, most of all, but everywhere to some degree.

If there is one thing that has always plunged me into sadness or compassion, I mean into a state that excludes all manner of nastiness or irony, it is the existence of Teilhard de Chardin - not only his existence, but the fact that he has, or could have had, readers, however small the number. In the presence of a reader of Teilhard de Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears.

De toutes ses forces (qui furent grandes), la littérature s'oppose à la notion d'actualité permanente, de perpétuel présent. Les livres appellent des lecteurs; mais ces lecteurs doivent avoir une existence individuelle et stable : ils ne peuvent être de purs consommateurs, de purs fantômes; ils doivent être aussi, en quelque manière, des sujets.

As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.