Reader Quotes

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.

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.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

The essay must be artistically rendered: You must keep the reader engaged, whether with wit, conflict, mischief, and/or yes, with honesty.

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!

An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.

I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.

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

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

Content is anything that adds value to the reader's life.

Study your reader first - your product second. If you understand his reactions, and present those phases of your product that relate to his needs, then you cannot help but write a good letter.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.

Before you put pen to paper, before you ring for your stenographer, decide in your own mind what effect you want to produce on your reader — what feeling you must arouse in him.

I'm a reader, so when I go to bookstores I need (stuff) that's going to help me. There a big emptiness there and I want to help fill that through song.

Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level.

If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

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.

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

Writing isn't just on the page; it's voices in the reader's head. Read what you write out loud to someone-anyone-and you will catch all kinds of things.

I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.

There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.

I am a slow reader. I always loved words, which is a strange thing given that I couldn't actually read them

The high-ceilinged rooms, the little balconies, alcoves, nooks and angles all suggest sanctuary, escape, creature comfort. The reader, the scholar, the browser, the borrower is king.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

The prevailing attitude of the speakers was one of heavy disagreement with a number of things which the reader had not said.

The characters in a children's book must reach into the heart of the reader on page one. Emotional content is the main reason a child and a parent will go back to a book again and again.

You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.

In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.