Reader Quotes
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Nice writing isn't enough. It isn't enough to have smooth and pretty language. You have to surprise the reader frequently, you can't just be nice all the time. Provoke the reader. Astonish the reader. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Use one startling adjective per page.
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Perhaps it's worth saying again: One reader's discomfort should never stand in the way of another reader's survival.
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Content is anything that adds value to the reader's life.
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I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.
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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.
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My television fed me visions, but I never created my own until I became a reader.
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The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.
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Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.
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I'll tell you what I was like as a child. I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader.
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If you had told me twenty years ago that I would write a novel set in Russia, much less two, I simply wouldn't have believed you. I had no familiarity with Russia or its history, but part of what drives me as a reader, and more and more as a writer, is curiosity, the desire to explore unfamiliar terrain and inhabit alternate lives.
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Wherever my story takes me, however dark and difficult the theme, there is always some hope and redemption, not because readers like happy endings, but because I am an optimist at heart.
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It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.
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Believe in the reader and they can connect the dots, if you succeed breathe life into the story
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It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.
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I love books. I've always been involved with books and I wanted to help the library in any way possible. I'm an avid reader.
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It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.
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The writer, as I see it, has the right of way, so it's up to the reader to look out.
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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
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The reader as well as the main character does not view the work from outside. He too is in the labyrinth.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.
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O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in everything.
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Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.
