Reader Quotes
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I'm just writing what I know. I've never been much of a reader of fantasy, and I think you write what you, personally, enjoy reading.
Sarah Dessen
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When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.
Charles Baxter
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I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.
Albert Goldbarth
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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!
William Makepeace Thackeray
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I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.
Amitava Kumar
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Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
William Zinsser
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I don't mind a narrator who's self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see.
Sarah Pinborough
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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.
Debra Dean
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But I am a sly and wicked narrator. If there is a secret to be plumbed for your benefit, Dear Reader, I shall strap on a head-lamp and a pick-ax and have at it.
Catherynne M. Valente
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A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world.
Elena Ferrante
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It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
George Plimpton
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A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author's doing all the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and white.
Sarah Orne Jewett
