Quotes About Reader

Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it's worth knowing about them. That's challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.

The challenge of nonfiction is keeping the attention of a reader over span of time, and to keep the quality of the writing as high as it needs to be to keep people's attention.

A story has to be a good date, because the reader can stop at any time. Remember, readers are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything.

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and it's object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science.

Jane Austen makes me detest all her characters, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her characters up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worthwhile, too. Some day I might examine the other end of her books and see.

I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the author considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite a nice compliment - but if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment.

They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

The love-affair of Enid Challenger and Edward Malone is not of the slightest interest to the reader, for the simple reason that it is not of the slightest interest to the writer.

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.

In order to maintain a capacity for astonishment, the poet can never anticipate the identity of the reader. Once the writer knows for whom he or she is writing, then the writer becomes too conscious of trying to influence that person and to interfere with the intuitive process.

At some level the subject of any story or poem is always the reader, and the writer who ignores this does so at his or her peril.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

Something else I want you to know: how glad I am, Constant Reader, that we're both still here. Cool, isn't it?

I've made some things for you, Constant Reader; you see them laid out before you in the moonlight. But before you look at the little handcrafted treasures I have for sale, let's talk about them for a bit, shall we? It won't take long. Here, sit down beside me. And do come a little closer. I don't bite. Except... we've known each other for a very long time, and I suspect you know that's not entirely true. Is it?

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much  . . . . including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster's back.

A reader knows the mind of sacred souls.

As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.

Ordinarily, when the great oak doors groaned open and someone entered Prat Library there would be a burst of sunlight, a bright harsh intrusion on the dim and quiet. But when Oriana Jeffers came through the doors, the light transmuted into moonbeams and star-shimmer, and all the books on the shelves fluttered awake. Oh joy, they whispered, a READER.

What is a library, but a temple of truth? What other function do books have, the great ones, but to change the reader? Books to comfort. But most of all, books to disturb you forward.

At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

El lector es un crítico con una ocupación importantísima: complacerse a sí mismo.

Reader, look,Not at his picture, but his book.

If we sound fluency, and we write poetry which appears to articulate that condition—Carlos thinks hard about this—a reader will not acknowledge wires as nets in a poem as anything but metaphor for the mill.