Quotes on Reader

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

If your depiction of loss doesn't make the reader feel loss, then you didn't depict it right.

I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

If having a story that's compelling - you want to know what will happen - is traditional, then ultimately I am a traditionalist. That is what readers care about. It's what I care about as a reader. Now if I can have that along with a strong girding of ideas and some kind of exciting technical forays - then that is just the jackpot.

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books.

Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.

Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.'

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

Women are books, and men the readers be.