Going back to my own past as a reader, I was a big, big reader of romances, particularly as a teenager, the age that my books are aimed at.
Right away I think of two books – ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Rebecca’ – and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there’s also an appealing darkness in both of them.
Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.
I didn’t like filtering the story through me, saying, ‘Reader, you’ll be safe with me. While it gets a little dangerous, it’ll be okay because, after all, you’re with me, because I’m a warm convivial voice. But let’s be entertained by this horrible stuff.’ I didn’t like that.
I try as hard as I know how to keep my reader relating on a broad level so I don’t lead her someplace where she thinks that’s the only thing that could cause insecurity.
Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.
I used to be a rabid reader, but now it’s scripts or nothing – network television is quite relentless, and you can’t drop the ball.
I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There’s a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.
Characters die all the time. At times, they die amongst a reader’s tears, and at others, amongst the applause, and some, still, in quiet satisfaction.
I’m incurably nosey – so naturally I’m a great reader.
I’m a big reader. My kids love reading, and I think it’s important, not just for development but for bonding. You start reading to kids before they can even understand what you’re saying to them, so I look at it as a fundamental tool for connection.
When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate.
Choosing the narrator for a first-person story like ‘Downriver’ is a crucial decision because the voice has to be one the reader wants to listen to, and the voice has to be a match for the emotion you want the story to carry.
For John le Carre, it was always who’s betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the ’30s, it’s a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.
For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
Before ‘Veronica Mars,’ I was not, and probably am still not, much of a crime reader. My mom left out a copy of ‘Helter Skelter’ when I was 10, and I secretly read it, and then I spent all my teenage years afraid of hippies. I kept away from crime books for, like, ten years.
I was really the first-line editor of the ‘House of Night’ series. I didn’t write that much of the story, and I didn’t know what was happening until my mom finished the book and sent it to me because I wanted to read it with fresh eyes as a general reader would.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
Something happens between a novel and its reader which is similar to the process of developing photographs, the way they did it before the digital age. The photograph, as it was printed in the darkroom, became visible bit by bit. As you read your way through a novel, the same chemical process takes place.
I’m a fairly ordinary person – a lifelong reader, a former software engineer, and former math teacher. I come from a wonderful family of teachers, musicians, librarians, and engineers. I think I surprised them as well as my friends and coworkers when I took up writing as a hobby and let it take over my life!
Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records – who’s read what – and this has led to people being rounded up and killed.
I’m lucky enough to have two different platforms to perform on – I do stand-up comedy, and I have ‘SNL.’ That’s where I make my most controversial statements because I can explain myself and I’m in control of the microphone, as opposed to Twitter, where it’s in the hands of the reader.
Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regulators and, above all, for investors because they have been prone to abuse by stock manipulators.
I’m not the best actor I can be, so I’m just working on it. I’m not the quickest reader in the world but when I get an acting book I can read it in two days.
I do not write for the reader to come, but for him who is here, short of reading the text on my shoulder.
A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.
I’ve always been a reader and a writer.
If the hairs on my neck stand up while I’m writing, I figure the reader will get the same kind of shock.
I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.
You can verify that in news meetings I sometimes say, ‘This is skewed too far to the left,’ or ‘The mix of stories seems overweeningly appealing to a reader with a certain set of sensibilities, and it shouldn’t.’
I read ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race’ and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer’s ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.
I’m sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about ‘Kevin,’ and of course, the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches, I never take a single reader for granted and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh.
If you know what you’re talking about, or if you feel that you do, the reader will believe you.
If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.
I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain.
I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children’s books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.
In Victorian fiction, there would be a chapter at the end devoted to righting all of the wrongs. I thought to right all of the wrongs would be too glib. I thought it would be better to lull the reader into thinking that is the way it would work, but then not to do that.
I loved history in my school days, and I have always been a voracious reader. But in India, you end up doing MBA, engineering or medicine.
Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.
When I read, I’m purely a reader.
As authors, we all have to learn not to be reactive to public statements about our books. It’s really not our business what each reader thinks of them.
Ordering is difficult. It’s like arranging pieces of music in a concert: What do you put first? What do you put after the intermission? I want the reader to be sort of surprised, to come to each story freshly.
The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn’t change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.
If there is any message in the ‘Wimpy Kid’ books, it is that reading can be and should be fun. As an adult reader, when I see an obvious moral lesson to be taught, I run in the other direction… Kids can sniff out an adult agenda from an early age. I’m writing for entertainment, not to impress literary judges.
