Quotes About Reader

To suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual; and, therefore, though in reality he should happen not to regard him with interest, it is one of the fictions of courtesy to presume that he does.

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.

The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

Note how patronized you feel as a reader. Does this writer think we're in third grade? Does he think his points are that hard to grasp?

This is the paradoxical responsibility of the reader: to replenish the strangeness of the novel by making connections with the familiar.

I hope for what I always hope for as a writer: a critical but kind reader. I think that is what we all hope for.

Use attribution to control the delivery of dialogue, creating the sort of dramatic pause an actor would insert. Otherwise, the reader will race through a line without realizing how it ought to be weighted.

So never dictate meaning to your reader. If need be, misdirect him. But always allow him to realize the truth before you state it outright. Trust your readers' intelligence and intuition, and they will return the favor.

A fully-realized and known world is also a boring world. Mystery, alongside conflict, is another of those  vital vittles that feeds the reader and keeps them hooked. Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason, I say -- so leave lots of questions.

Conflict is the food that feeds the reader. It's a spicy hell-broth that nourishes.

I've heard writers defend some pretty appalling stuff by arguing that they have an obligation to depict the world as it is, but fiction has no such obligation. It's not a mirror to reality, it's a prism. It refracts experience. Also, I think some writers are reluctant to admit that part of their aim is to shock the reader, and that's a downward spiral. We have, as consumers, become increasingly inured to violence. Most of us are pretty hard to shock.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.

When an arguer argues dispassionately, he thinks only of the argument, and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately...had used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result should be one would thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact as one accepts that a pea is green or a canary yellow.

Virginia Woolf had to ask herself "How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader's soul?

Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods, who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No!

the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–-

Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.

A superficial reader of Proust's work- rather a contradiction in terms since a superficial reader will get so bored, so engulfed in his own yawns, that he will never finish the book- [the] inexperienced reader, let us say... will probably conclude that the main action of the book is a series of parties; for example, a dinner occupies a hundred and fifty pages, a soirée half a volume.

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.

Mr. Wilson affirms that the only characteristic Nabokov trait in my translation (aside from an innate sado-masochistic urge to torture both the reader and himself, as Mr. Wilson puts it in a clumsy attempt to stick a particularly thick and rusty pin into my effigy) is my addiction to rare and unfamiliar words. It does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey; that is his loss.

But every once in a while I have to remind the reader of my appearance much as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of the book

Najdraži san jednog autora jeste da pretvori ?itaoca u gledaoca.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the book or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed the book