Quotes About Insight

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.

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.

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

I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.

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.

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.

I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

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

All of my books now come from readers' ideas.

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

What most readers do not realize is that it takes a particular genius to write funny, to satirize.

If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.

Readers let me know that they like books that have more to them than meets the eye. Had they not let me know that, I never would have written 'The View From Saturday.'

I'm hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers.

Writing is a way of getting at the things most people would prefer to escape. Writing takes me to the center of life. That's my invitation to my readers as well.

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.