Quotes About Engagement

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

I think of myself as the eyes and ears and voice of the reader.

One thing we never did with 'Bad Company' was talk down to our reader. And we certainly don't do that with the new story, 'Bad Company, First Casualties.'

The reader is going to imprint on the characters he sees first. He is going to expect to see these people often, to have them figure largely into the story, possibly to care about them. Usually, this will be the protagonist.

Words build a bridge between the imaginations of writer and reader, creating something unique between them.

An ideal reader is someone who doesn't know what on Earth you've been doing, who will look at it with absolute freshness and go, 'Oh, so that's what you've been up to.'

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

Every story makes a promise to the reader. Actually, two promises, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think.

If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling.

It's important to begin a biography or any book or story with something to draw the reader in.

I like to write about things that fascinate me because I believe that they will also fascinate my readers as well.

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

Readers have actually changed the way I've done things, changed the course of my career even, about four or five times. Just from reader feedback.

I've included these little jokes and mysteries in my writing for the amusement of readers.

Everything I publish is for my readers.

I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.

I wouldn't say the world is my parish, but my readers are my parish. And especially the readers that write to me. They're my parish. And it's a responsibility that I enjoy.

I love being in touch with my readers and fellow writers! It's just amazing to have such access to people.

I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing.

Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.

I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.