Reader Quotes
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Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.
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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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I had to decide if I wanted to be known as a writer or a reader. I chose writer.
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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.
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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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If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.
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What I do with the story itself varies of course, but what I want to do is to present the world so that the reader can access it without tripping over the details.
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As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.
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I've always liked language and been a big reader. I always loved books as objects. My favorite time of year as a child was September when we'd go buy all kinds of notebooks and pens and markers for school. I think I wanted to be a writer just so I'd be able to fill up all those pages.
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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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This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
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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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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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She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.
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So it was doing all this research or going to the archives or doing all these interviews or traveling, and then trying as much as I can to delete all of that research in a later draft so that all the reader cares about is the characters.
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Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.
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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…
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There's something very self-conscious about a writer who's addressing his reader. Don't do that.
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I would encourage you as a screenwriter to trust your story and don't make notes for the actors or don't make notes for the reader.
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One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective.... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero.
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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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The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.
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Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it
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Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
