Quotes About Reader

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

I can understand the concept of the "reluctant reader," but for me it's akin to saying somebody really doesn't like to eat. Or breathe.

The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

At last, the pure and fragile snow was falling upon us, separating off the air from the dirt, the living from the dead, the reader from the book.

the clash between Austin Dickinson and his wife, who had been the poet's intimate and her keenest reader. Out of this clash a lasting feud developed, and it was the opponents in this feud, their allies and warring descendants, who devised the image of the poet as her fame grew and endured.

On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.

If there were but one thing I could hope for from the reader of the remainder of this book, it would be that he or she possesses the capacity to perceive the miraculous.

Am I mystical again, reader? Then I hope you are too, or will be before you have done with this same beautiful mystical life of ours.

The book must suffice in itself: if it please you, excellent reader, I shall be rewarded for my labor; if it please you not, I shall reward you with a snap of my fingers, and good riddance to you. -BRAZ CUBAS

The lady reader, who is my friend and has opened this book with the idea of relaxing between yesterday's cavatina and today's waltz, would like to close it in a hurry now that she sees we are skirting an abyss... Don't do it my dear; I'll wheel about.

In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.

And it could be successfully done by the technical trick (a justifiable one!) of maintaining the illusion, for the reader, that he is perusing an intimate journal, but doing your story with infinite care, infinite pains.

Historians rewrite the truth every day. What interests us is the truth that gets the reader to reach for his wallet

one word of advice to my reader. It is this. It needs

I shall neither trouble the reader, nor myself, with any apology for publishing of these sermons; for if they be, in any measure, truly serviceable to the end for which they are designed, I do not see what apology is necessary; and if they be not so, I am sure none can be sufficient.Tillotson.

Dear Reader, I'm most excited to share with you, in digital form for the first time, this love story.  It was written and published early in my career when finished manuscripts were delivered on paper instead of in an email!    I consider each book I write to be a personal letter to you, the reader.  This is particularly true of the stories in which a man and

Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess. A half-good sex scene is not half as hot; it actually moves into the negative numbers, draining any heat from the surrounding material.

I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.

I would like to please the reader, and I think that surprise has to be an element of this, and that may necessitate a certain amount of teasing. To shock the reader is something else again. That has to be handled with great care if you're not going to alienate and hurt him, and I'm firmly against that, just as I disapprove of people who dress with that in mind--dye their hair blue and stick safety pins through their noses and so on.

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?