Quotes on Reader

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing-to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics-Well, they can do whatever they wish.

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language, these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style.

Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties.

God is a writer and we are both the heroes and the readers.

Which brings me to my conclusion upon Free Will and Predestination, namely - let the reader mark it - that they are identical.

Tell your readers to use it or lose it. If you don't use your muscles, they get weak. If you don't use your mind it begins to fail.

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it's work... Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.

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

Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.