Quotes About Reader

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

What's your favorite book?' is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services--and favorite isn't, anyway, the right word to describe the relationship a reader has with a particularly cherished book. Most serious readers can point to one book that has a place in their life like the one that 'Middlemarch' has in mine.

A reader who senses the echo of the exodus/conquest18 language in Mark 1:2 will find the intuition immediately reinforced by what follows.

the Bible contains the record of a dynamic, developing tradition of thought, and the aim of interpretation should be to let Scripture involve its reader in its own process of thought, so that the reader's own thinking may continue in the direction it sets

You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me.

You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that is what my mother made me.

My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative.

At least Lester had the decency to weep at his act of perfidy. Reader, do you know what 'perfidy' means? I have a feeling you do, based on the scene that unfolded here. But you should look up the word in your dictionary, just to be sure.

Punctuation is a fabulous tool for controlling your reader - you even get to control where they breathe. That's what I call power!

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

With only the dimmest memories of a high-school course or two in general science, they find themselves confronting dialog which seems largely derived from the frontiers of theoretical physics and a group of characters who might, conceivably, enjoy chatting with Albert Einstein, but certainly no one less advanced. A few pages of all this obscurity and the hapless first reader ... closes the magazine or book ... and abandons the field to the children ...

On the two-way street of communication, a happy symbiosis is achieved when a writer tosses up an offbeat usage or a puzzling word and the working reader figures it out and savors it.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.

The headlines which work best are those which promise the reader a benefit

The ribosome did not contain the recipe for the protein; it was a tape reader. It could make any protein so long as it was fed the right tape of "messenger" RNA.

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

If fiction and fantasy books are escapism, then let an author write them so as to better equip the reader to face reality by the end.

Short story collections are the literary equivalent of canapés, tapas and mezze in the world of gastronomy: Delightful assortments of tasty morsels to whet the reader's appetite.

Through writing, an author opens the window of his heart through which a reader can see the inner self of the author.

When you go to the mind reader, do you get half price?

John Marshall on writing: The man who by seeking embellishment hazards confusion, is greatly mistaken in what constitutes good writing. The meaning ought never to be mistaken. Indeed, the reader should never be obliged to search for it.

The impatient, feckless reader, posessed of no glimmer of intellectual or historical curiosity, should do an old historian a favor and skip the next few pages, proceeding directly to the Silence itself (Part III). I would assume that, in these horrid modern times, that will include most of you. Of course, those readers least likely to read these footnotes, and thus least likely to appreciate the next few pages, will skip this note and bore themselves upon the ennui of history .

There is a final resource to which I've resorted when necessary—the imagination. I have done this with judicious care, imagining for my reader only what I already know is very likely, and even then only when an informed speculation can set these documents into their proper context. Where I have been unable to explain events or motives, I have left them unexplained, out of respect for their hidden realities.