Quotes About Reader

Economic controversy is generally a thankless task. You cannot hope to make any impression on your opponent. Yet he is the only reader on whose interest you can count.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

The bottom line always remains the same: What is the basic humanity of the character? How do I make them resonate with the reader?

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

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

I surrender to the world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.

When a novel has 200 000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200 000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

The voices began to take over the book and to speak to the reader over the biographer's head. They whispered, "Listen to me, not to her. I am authentic. I speak with authority. Go to the full texts of the journals, the letters home, and the rest. They will tell you what you want to know.

A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.

She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

The digital book has no front or back covers; there is no place to assert ownership, and there is nothing to own. "The digital delivery module" is a piece of molded plastic made in China, encasing a few memory chips. That is not the book, that's the "reader." Wait, I thought I was the reader. Oh, never mind.

The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do.

I've lived in Washington since 1981 and have been a faithful reader of 'The Washington Post' ever since.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

Even my fiction novels are all about outdoor adventure, and have plenty of information to encourage the reader to get interested in adventure and conservation.

I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

I'm a bit more of a suspense reader on the adult side, but my favorites were the ones I grew up reading.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.