Reader Quotes
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As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.
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Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.
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I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.
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When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.
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I didn't know the Green Lantern comics at all. I was a Superman reader.
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When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.
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It's not going to help my reader if we only show girls who are size 6's. Everyone is beautiful, it's just a matter of confidence, and we try to show that.
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Creator and reader are partners in the invisible creating something out of nothing, time and time again.
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The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his 'basic rights.'
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I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.
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The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.
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If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear.
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A cold, calculating nightmare. Sharp as a finely honed blade. 'The Lucid Dreaming' cuts, separating the flesh before you even know you've been injured. It makes you bleed as a reader.
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Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.
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The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.
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Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.
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The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
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No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
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I tend not to attempt to describe pain. I don't feel I can comprehend or re-create the personal suffering of others, so I simply try to tell what happened, or what I imagine happened. I also think it helps to let the reader fill in a lot of the blanks. Melodrama is patronizing. With a straightforward statement, readers can figure out for themselves what's going on.
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Don't be afraid to make a mistake, your readers might like it.
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Never, ever underestimate your readers. Everything you do registers.
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The most casual reader of the New Testament can scarcely fail to see the commanding position the resurrection of Christ holds in Christianity. It is the creator of its new and brighter hopes, of its richer and stronger faith, of its deeper and more exalted experience.
