Quotes About Understanding

I have a profound resistance to the idea that a reader could say, 'Oh, well, that's her story.' We should all be interested, no matter where we come from, or who our parents are. It's not my province; it's ours. These questions concern us all.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It's inevitable.

To make the reader afraid, I had to be afraid.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

If you know what you're talking about, or if you feel that you do, the reader will believe you.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.

A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

Who is the ideal reader? God only knows.

There's something to be said for an author who clearly respects a reader.

However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others.

The ideal, it seems to me, is to show things happening and allow the reader to decide what they mean.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

A writer without a reader doesn't exist.

Each reader has to find her or his own message within a book.

I don't have a disregard for my reader in humor pieces.

I'm not really a good reader. What I mean is, I think I'm not one of those people who can read a story and analyze it just like that.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.

If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: You're not the audience!