Reader Quotes

The Bible - it's sort of the other person in the room. There's this book, the reader, and the Bible.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

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.

Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

I want a kiss to be so believable it gives the reader shivers.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

I'm an avid biography reader.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.

Who is the ideal reader? God only knows.

I'm the slowest reader in the world, because I perform it all in my head.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.

But we talk about issues, we talk about people, we talk about personalities. George is a very good reader of people, and he's very perceptive about people, and you know, that's fine.