A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
I think there’s no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.
Before, being a model, it was just a job, and I was making fun of it. But today, I take my career more seriously. The fact that a reader may buy an Armani item because she’d seen it on me in a magazine is very important to me. So much so that I intend to launch my own label.
I’ve never been a fast reader. I’m fickle; I don’t finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
If the reader is rooting for the protagonist, they’ll forgive you just about everything else.
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
Journalism’s ultimate purpose is to inform the reader, to bring him each day a letter from home and never to permit the serving of special interests.
I must confess that I’m not a great reader. At the moment I’m reading my son’s ‘Stig of the Dump’ by Clive King and I’ve got a plant catalogue on the go.
I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader… I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice… mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
Only a reader can become a writer. Develop a lively intellect and the ability to become interested in anything, no matter how mundane it might seem at first. Look for the story. Develop an eye for detail. Feed your mind and your brain: learn as much as you can about everything you can.
I’m the slowest reader in the world, because I perform it all in my head.
Every opportunity to practice is a gift to the developing reader. Practice, practice, practice, in every form and medium!
I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.
One of my favorite things about the DC Universe, growing up as a reader, was just how big it was and just how many characters and superheroes there were. And how many odd characters there were.
If a book I’ve committed myself to review turns out to be ‘disappointing’ I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.
The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea’s alternate reality.
For every reader and writer of steampunk fiction, there are probably hundreds or thousands of other activists who gleefully embrace some non-written manifestation of the steampunk ethos.
I want all my books to provoke some kind of response in the reader, to make them think something or feel something or both, and for that to become a part of them and work into their own lives.
I’d like the reader to decide if he is willing to pay minute sums for content. I’d like the economics of web to be controlled between authors and readers, not advertiser.
I love reader mail, and I do read it, but I won’t read hate mail.
I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.
What I do find enormously gratifying is the reviews my books get from the American press. They are so on the ball compared to anywhere else. It’s so satisfying to get a review that conveys the reader understood precisely what I was trying to get at.
I don’t believe in writing anything that I don’t know about or haven’t researched about personally. I like to transport the reader to places, and in order to do that I have to do the research.
Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you’re not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.
If you write in category, you write knowing there’s a framework, there are reader expectations.
I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.
We’re not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader’s own life ‘outside’ the story changes the story.
I’ve always been an avid reader. If I don’t have a book in the car, I’ll stop and pick one up just to have something to read. I don’t even remember learning to read.
I never want to dumb it down. If there’s any simplification, it’s just a simplification to make sure that the reader understands the point that the character is trying to make.
A writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years’ time.
I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!
If the book is a mystery to its author as she’s writing, inevitably it’s going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.
The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.
It is not the task of a reader to please her subjects.
I have a couple of dozen books on my reader: ideal for a long trip or an afternoon waiting at the medical clinic. It’s flexible.
It’s what the reader thinks that counts.
If you’re writing a thriller, mystery, Western or adventure-driven book, you’d better keep things moving rapidly for the reader. Quick pacing is vital in certain genres. It hooks readers, creates tension, deepens the drama, and speeds things along.
Each reader has to find her or his own message within a book.
I’m a voracious reader, and I like to explore all sorts of writing without prejudice and without paying any attention to labels, conventions or silly critical fads.
I have always been an obsessive reader – I remember going back and forth to the local library with stacks of books taller than I was.
Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.
My ideal relationship with the reader is that at certain points they will have said, ‘I’m finding this quite tough, but I’m going to hang in there,’ then at the end they will say, ‘Oh God, I’m glad I hung on, it was so worth it.’
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
How you leave the reader is so important – not the climax; I call it the ‘exit feeling’.
I’m a ‘frotteur,’ someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing.
I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn’t an absurd thing – a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.
It’s good not only to realize that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but that you don’t want to. There’s a certain type of reader that you don’t ever want to write for.
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
I don’t know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.
When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that’s created be as logical and whole as possible.
Write about what you care about. If you do that, you’re probably going to do your best writing, reach off the page and touch the reader. How are you going to make the reader care if you don’t care yourself?
By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.
I’ll tell you what I was like as a child. I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader.
