Quotes on Reader

Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.

I write adult fiction, but a good 40 to 50 per cent of my readers are teenagers. I love that if they have to grow up and move past JK Rowling they can move to me. From Jo to Jodi!

Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.

In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.

Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.

What can happen if a young reader picks up a book he/she isn't yet ready for? Questions, maybe. Usually, that child puts down the book and says, 'Boring.' Or, 'I'm not ready for this.' Kids are really good at knowing what they can handle.

Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader.

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

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'

All right I think we've been down here in the dark long enough. There's a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand Constant Reader and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.

The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.