Reader Quotes
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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!
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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.
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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.
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I was never much of a reader. I'm a slow reader, which is unusual, because I'm so into language and I love words so much. But it's hard for me to read.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
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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.
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Punctuation is a fabulous tool for controlling your reader - you even get to control where they breathe. That's what I call power!
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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.
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Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.
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A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world.
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I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.
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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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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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My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There's an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there's enough of the present included to lull the 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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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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Perhaps it's worth saying again: One reader's discomfort should never stand in the way of another reader's survival.
