Reader Quotes

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Animal personalities have always intrigued me, the desire to find out more about them made a reader out of me.

Text is just ink on a page until a reader comes along and gives it life.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

The world is dark, and light is precious. Come closer, dear reader. You must trust me. I am telling you a story.

Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as is possible, and moves the reader towards him: or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.

I'm an avid biography reader.

My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.

Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.

But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living.

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.

Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.

Save the time of the reader, for it is valuable

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

Not every reader is a leader, but every leader must be a reader.

Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

I am a slow reader, and fast eater; I wish it were the other way around.

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.

There are four basic emotions - mad, sad, glad and scared. And if you touch those emotions then you can grab your audience, your reader.

A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.

I shall omit former particulars, and begin with informing the Reader, that, in 1792, I was strangely visited, by day and night, concerning what was coming upon the whole earth.

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.

I really rely a lot more on memory. I'm definitely not as good of a sight reader.

The writer after all is only half the book, the other half is the reader.

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

Good writing is like a bomb: it explodes in the face of the reader.

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.

A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author's doing all the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and white.

The funny thing is, I'm not really a big reader, not a big fan of books in the first place.

You have to be a speedy reader 'cause there's so, so much to read!

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.

Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.

The purpose of paragraphing is to give the reader a rest. The writer is saying . . . : Have you got that? If so, I'll go to the next point.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.