Top 540 Reader Quotes

I read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Reader’s Digest… I read some responsible journalism, and from that, I form my own opinions. I also happen to be intelligent, and I question everything.

I have hardly detained the reader long enough on the subject, to give him a just impression of the stress laid on confession. It is one of the great points to which our attention was constantly directed.

I was a good reader of a rugby match. I could kick, too.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn’t seem to be much difference in my own writing.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

I focus on the elements of a movie that are meant to invisibly affect me as a viewer. The edges. As an author, I’m aware of how the subconscious things can pluck at a reader’s emotions, and I love it when filmmakers do the same.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you’re talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

I don’t want to put up this act of being a voracious reader, which I am not.

As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.

The idea that certain things in life – and in the universe – don’t yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother’s house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it’s much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It’s a meeting on the page.

When you’re so close to material, it would be as if you had come out of a bad marriage. You would be so close to it that you would be paying attention to detail that may not mean a whole lot for the reader.

I was eccentric, even as a kid. I was an early reader, an early talker. I was very curious in a way that maybe the other kids weren’t. I was a little more outgoing.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you’re simultaneously the writer and the reader.

If you’re an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity.

It is not the purpose of the ad or commercial to make the reader or listener say, ‘My what a clever ad.’ It is the purpose of advertising to make the reader say, ‘I believe I’ll buy one when I’m shopping tomorrow’.

A book is a journey: It’s a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader’s experience of a book is going to be different.

Before the reader turns his back upon the Grand Basin once for all, I should like to put a name upon the glacier it contains – since it is the fashion to name glaciers.

Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don’t think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Crime novels have a clear beginning, middle, and end: a mystery, its investigation, and its resolution. The reader expects events to play out logically and efficiently, and these expectations force the writer to spend a good deal of time working on macrostructure rather than prettifying individual sentences.

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

Like most lit nerds, I’m a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it – some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what’s the use of putting them down on paper.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

If your depiction of loss doesn’t make the reader feel loss, then you didn’t depict it right.

‘The Reader’ is about a young man’s experience of falling in love with somebody who, it turns out, made some choices that were unavoidable in her life that resulted in horrific crimes against humanity.

As a reader I want to be present and entertained. I don’t want to be taught lessons, and I don’t want to be spoken down to. I want to be treated as a peer and to be made to feel welcome.

The Architect is just one of a series of works which examine the confrontation of innocence and experience, illustrating the complex ethics of power that exist between reader and writer, critic and artist, the human and the divine.

I think it’s a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn’t happen. I’m a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren’t. How can you buy a book if you haven’t heard of it?

This is what I have discovered – and it has been a gift in itself – that books live over and over again in different people’s minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader’s experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a relatively slow reader.

To be misunderstood can be the writer’s punishment for having disturbed the reader’s peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

Anybody who claims to read the entire paper every day is either the world’s fastest reader or the world’s biggest liar.

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool.

The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led.

I think ‘accessible’ just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry.

The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

I wanted to create a heroine that was flawed. I wanted her to be a real person. She’s selfish, she’s childish, she’s immature and because I’m doing a three-book arc I really played that up in the first book. I wanted the reader to be annoyed with her at times.

Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide.

Maybe storytelling belongs in audio – a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.

Aesthetics – rather than reason – shapes our thought processes. First comes aesthetics, then logic. ‘Thinking in Numbers’ is not about an attempt to impress the reader but to include the reader, draw the reader in, by explaining my experiences – the beauty I feel in a prime number, for example.

I’m not sure Kinsey has changed in these first twelve books. I think the reader learns more about her, but from Kinsey’s perspective, only three years have passed while the rest of us have been getting older at a much faster clip.