Reader Quotes

• 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.

  

  Anthony Trollope
  • Art
  • Novel
  • Reader

• The reader as well as the main character does not view the work from outside. He too is in the labyrinth.

  

  Alain Robbe-Grillet
  • Reader
  • Outside
  • Labyrinth

• 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
  • Reader
  • Explain
  • Drop

• You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.

  

  Erica Jong
  • Voice
  • Reader
  • Timbres

• 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
  • Thinking
  • Black
  • Interesting

• I hope to offend every reader.

  

  Milo Yiannopoulos
  • Reader
  • Offend

• 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
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • Problem

• I don't consciously try to take my readers on a journey as I don't really think about my readers when I'm writing. I just try to write what I feel passionately about, to tell a story down onto the page.

  

  Michael Morpurgo
  • Trying
  • Feels
  • Journey

• 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
  • Truth
  • Reader
  • Clues

• 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
  • Reader
  • Breathe Needs

• I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

  

  Vladimir Nabokov
  • Needs
  • Imagine
  • Reader

• 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
  • Book
  • Feels
  • Needs

• The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians.

  

  Bartolomé de las Casas
  • Imagination
  • Christians
  • Cruelty

• 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
  • Creation
  • Poems
  • Aesthetician

• I write, fighting for every sentence, fighting to hold the reader with every paragraph.

  

  Hector Tobar
  • Fighting
  • Reader
  • Paragraph

• 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
  • Writing
  • Know
  • Reading

• Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

  

  Wallace Stegner
  • Trying
  • Writer
  • Reader

• It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

  

  Ethan Canin
  • Job
  • Reader
  • Disarm

• But in all things whether we shall make only a due use of the liberties we have asked, is left entirely to the judicious reader to decide.

  

  Sarah Fielding
  • Liberty
  • Reader

• If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

  

  Rick Atkinson
  • Reader
  • Conclusions
  • Vividly

• 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
  • Today
  • Evil
  • Chance

• The making of art is a profoundly social activity, even if it’s one-on-one with some sort of ideal reader who doesn’t exist.

  

  August Kleinzahler
  • Art
  • Reader
  • Activity

• Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

  

  Jonathan Dee
  • Reader
  • Novels
  • Experiment

• 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
  • Books
  • Writer
  • Reader

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