Quotes About Reader

It is the real power of a book - not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself.

Is it possible to write a reverent novel," said Nassrin, "and to have it be good? Besides, the contract with the reader is that this is not reality, it's an invented world. There must be some blasted space in life," she added crossly, "where we can be offensive, for God's sake.

A novel has to entertain -- that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page.

Annie Wilkes was the perfect audience, a woman who loved stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them. She was the embodiment of that Victorian archetype, Constant Reader.

And watch out for the blade, Constant Reader. It is a Stephen King story, after all.

what really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world.

Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.

Good writing takes advantage of a reader's expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc.

Often the pronouns I, me, and you are not just harmless but downright helpful. They simulate a conversation, as classic style recommends, and they are gifts to the memory-challenged reader.

Though bad writing has always been with us, the rules of correct usage are the smallest part of the problem. Any competent copy editor can turn a passage that is turgid, opaque, and filled with grammatical errors into a passage that is turgid, opaque, and free of grammatical errors. Rules of usage are well worth mastering, but they pale in importance behind principles of clarity, style, coherence, and consideration for the reader.

Drama—formalized imitation, enacted upon a stage—is precisely behavior portraying behavior, but distilled ever closer to the essence. Literature takes that transmission one more difficult step, portraying action in the imagination of the writer and the reader, in the complete absence of both real actors and a material stage.

God Writes only consonants...the reader is the writer.

I was always, luckily, only a reader.

Take my advice, dear reader, don't talk epigrams even if you have the gift. I know, to those have, the temptation is almost irresistible. But resist it. Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to be somewhat chiselled, as it were, before it will quite fit into an epigram.

A system of education, which would not gratify this disposition in any party, is requisite, in order to obviate the difficulty, and the reader will find a something said to that purpose in perusing this tract.

La letteratura agisce sulle fibre nervose di chi s'imbatte nel fortunoso incontro tra un libro e la propria vita. Sono appuntamenti che non si possono prenotare né raccomandare. A ogni lettore spetta la sorpresa di fronte alla mescola improvvisa tra i suoi giorni e le pagine di un libro.

Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'

It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

I have always been immersed in a world filled with words, earlier as a reader and now, finally, as both a reader and a writer.

Okur kitap arar ama, kitab?n da okuru buldu?unu ben çok gördüm. Aç?klanabilir bir ?ey söylemiyorum belki, ama "rastlant?lar"?n ço?u, aç?klayamad???m?z için rastlant? görünmez mi?

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool - and I'm not any of those - to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.