Quotes About Reader

When a writer puts words on paper, it is an intimate act. The reader hears your words in his voice and he becomes the bones of your story. The reader is the foundation that you wrap in muscle and sinew. You build the hero on the reader's delicate frame until your story is his story. Your sorrow is his; your joy is a communion you both celebrate.

Fewer things leave a deeper mark on the reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart.

A story is an endless labyrinth of words, images and spirits, conjured up to show us the invisible truth about ourselves. A story is, after all, a conversation between the narrator and the reader, and just as narrators can only relate as far as their ability will permit, so too readers can only read as far as what is already written in their souls.

I HEARD A REGULAR CUSTOMER SAY that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart.

Stories have no beginning and no end, only doors through which one may enter them. A story is an endless labyrinth of words, images and spirits, conjured up to show us the invisible truth about ourselves. A story is, after all, a conversation between the narrator and the reader, and just as narrators can only relate as far as their ability will permit, so too readers can only read as far as what is already written in their souls.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd.

What we have to work with is hints and allegations, really, evidence, sometimes only a trace, that points to something lying behind the text. It's useful to keep in mind that any aspiring writer is probably also a hungry, aggressive reader and will have absorbed a tremendous amount of literary history and literary culture.

I am not simply teaching the reading; I am teaching the reader.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

One executive suggests a discipline — putting down first what you want the reader to do, next the three most important things the reader needs to understand to take that action, then starting to write. When you're done, he suggests asking yourself whether if you were the reader, would you take action on the basis of what is written.

Regards," "Best wishes," "All the best" are more personal than the others and less formal, but not appropriate if you don't know your reader. And there isn't anything wrong with simply

It [Joyce's "Ulysses"] plays on the reader's sympathies to his own undoing unless sleep kindly intervenes and puts a stop to this drain of energy. Arrived at page 135, after making several heroic efforts to get at the book, to "do it justice", as the phrase goes, I fell at last into profound slumber.

With humor, it's so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

Chi di voi vorrà fare il giornalista, si ricordi di scegliere il proprio padrone: il lettore.

What I learned then helps now in my writing: working under pressure, conducting an interview, doing research, using the language efficiently. I never forget that a book is not an end in itself. Just like a newspaper or a magazine, a book is a means of communication, which is why I try to grab the reader by the throat and not let go to the end.

The technology, called near-field communication, involves a microchip that can send and receive data across very short distances, about four inches. Instead of swiping a credit card, you hold your phone near a reader and let the data zip between the two devices.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

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.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.