The language has got to be fully alive – I can’t bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don’t see why any reader should put up with it.
The opening lines of a book are so important. You really need to somehow charm your reader. If you can’t get her attention in the first pages, you may have lost her. There has to be an ambience.
I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four.
I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn’t preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.
I think some people wished I’d kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I’m doing it completely intellectually.
I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.
Certainly not every reader has liked every one of my books, but I think that’s a good thing because it means I’m not repeating myself.
I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
I have been a politically conscious citizen. I’ve been an artist, a reader, and have been chiselled by that.
At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader’s mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.
Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.
I’m a voracious reader, and I love to throw myself into it.
I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‘You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.’
I don’t think of myself as a fast reader. I just read a lot. When someone else might think, ‘I might do the dishes,’ I don’t. But then the dishes multiply.
It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is, to some degree, an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge.
Occasionally, I hear grumbles about everything being a series or a trilogy, but apart from the question of them maybe selling more books, I think that there’s a real problem in trying to introduce a new world or a new concept while also getting your reader to pay close attention to your characters and themes.
A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I’m transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.
While the spoken word can travel faster, you can’t take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.
At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.
Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It’s probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.
No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don’t see the point in doing that.
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: ‘Where,’ the reader asks, ‘do you get your ideas?’ It’s a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, ‘I don’t know.’
As I write each new Thorne novel, I’m determined that whatever is happening plot-wise, a new layer of the onion will be peeled away and reveal something about Thorne that is surprising to me as much as anyone else. If I can remain interested in the character, then hopefully the reader will stay interested, too.
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.
A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader.
I loved ‘Harry Potter’ growing up. I’m dyslexic and a slow reader, but I could get through the thick ones in days!
The experience of reading a printed comic book will never change, but now, thanks to the digital age, there are many different ways to enjoy the same story. Digital comic books, of course, can be interactive in many different ways, allowing the reader to feel like a participant in the story.
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
I’ve never worried about ‘the reader’ because there isn’t one. There are thousands, and they all have strong opinions, from ‘Magician’ was the best ever,’ and I’ve gone downhill since to ‘The new book is the best ever,’ so to whom to I listen? So I write for myself and hope other people like it.
General reader feedback is usually pretty worthless. 99% of people give feedback that is irrelevant, stupid, or just flat out wrong. But that 1% of people who give good feedback are invaluable.
I’m a lousy reader.
I want a kiss to be so believable it gives the reader shivers.
Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it’s still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn’t want information. He wants a story.
The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace – you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader’s going to finish what you’re writing.
I have been an avid reader of ‘Golf Digest’ ever since I started playing this great game.
When I was a kid, I loved having a book in my hand. I still do. I wasn’t a fast reader, but I was a steady reader. I read all of The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Cherry Ames books.
No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel… I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.
I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.
I’m certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style – they’re valid components of a novel and you can’t complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.
I think that kids are a wonderful, wonderful reader to have in your head.
I grew up a big comic book reader, as a kid, and I love the whole fanboy crowd.
I mean, my dad’s a television producer, and I knew I could get a job as an assistant or a reader with one of his friends, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.
Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
For me it’s more important that I outline all the facets of a controversial issue and let the reader make up his or her mind. I don’t care if readers change their minds, but I would like readers to ask themselves why their opinion is what it is.
The reader is going to imprint on the characters he sees first. He is going to expect to see these people often, to have them figure largely into the story, possibly to care about them. Usually, this will be the protagonist.
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
I’m not a natural reader but there are books I’ll read and read again.
My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers – Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.
I was never a great reader, but there were two stories I loved best: Kipling’s ‘The Elephant’s Child’ and ‘The Jungle Book.’ Deep down, I’ve always wanted to write a book about a wild child and an elephant.
From early on there were two things that filled my life – music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’ That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
