Reader Quotes
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I really rely a lot more on memory. I'm definitely not as good of a sight reader.
John Petrucci
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I believe it’s something that happens when one is around art, and when one is close to books: they seep into your system, into your blood, and start to activate something in your life. We start living in the way that some of these characters live, with some sense of their sensibility. It’s almost as if the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader…
Nilo Cruz
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Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. "It is," he says, "because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas
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You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop-H2O. The reader will get it.
George Singleton
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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 need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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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Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.
Mem Fox
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I was an avid reader as a child. I am losing that habit now, as my brain congeals into cabbage from wearing too many heels and too much foundation.
Swara Bhaskar
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There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.
Flannery O'Connor
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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.
Brian Christian
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Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it
Nella Larsen
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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.
Gary Lutz
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After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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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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Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.
Esther Freud
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The whole past and the whole world are alive in my heart, and I shall do my part to communicate their presence to my readers.
George Sarton
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But beware, dear reader. For we go out into the wide, wild world, looking to change, looking to grow, looking for wisdom. But wisdom is hard to come by, and once achieved, it is very easily lost. Especially when one is leaving the wide, wild world - and returning to the place you once fled.
Adam Gidwitz
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The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.
Seth Godin
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I think not in two or three dimensional terms but in five dimensional terms when I consider a novel. There's height, width, and depth, there's the time factor, and then there's the factor which I call the cerebral factor of the reader, the way the reader adjusts to all the other dimensions, which is the fifth dimension.
Richard Grossman
