Explore Quotes on Reader

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

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

My purpose is to entertain and please myself. I feel that if I am entertained, then there will be enough other readers who will be entertained, too.

I want the reader to know what's going on. So there's never a mystery in my books.

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

I wanted to be a teacher, but I was a lousy student, one of the slowest readers. It was a tremendous struggle. But I'm lucky I had some teachers who saw something in me.

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.

When I was about 25, I went to a hand reader, this Indian guy in a funky neighborhood. He said: The height of your success won't happen until you're in your late 40s.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

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

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

A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

I don't want to write for adults. I want to write for readers who can perform miracles. Only children perform miracles when they read.

Book readers are special people, and they will always turn to books as the ultimate pleasure. Those who do not read are the unfortunate ones. There's nothing wrong with them; but they are missing out on one of life's compensations and rewards. A great book is a friend that never lets you down. You can return to it again and again and the joy first derived from it will still be there.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

As a reader, I notice political views regardless of whether or not the book is fiction. What annoys me is when said views do nothing to advance the narrative.