Reader Quotes
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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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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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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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The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.
Eudora Welty
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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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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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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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Some men are one thing on the surface and another underneath. The true poet shows not just the exterior of his subject, but all the contradictions within, and lets the reader draw his own conclusions.
Steven Saylor
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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.
Ewan McGregor
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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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If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.
Rick Atkinson
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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!
Nicola Morgan
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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.
Teju Cole
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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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Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.
Amitava Kumar
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The intelligent perusal of fine games cannot fail to make the reader a better player and a better judge of the play of others.
Emanuel Lasker
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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
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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.
Stephen Sondheim
