Reader Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

John Locke

William Cobbett

John Cheever

Edward Bok

Charlotte Mary Yonge

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Amos Bronson Alcott

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections ; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

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

An ancient author tells us somewhere, with the tone of a pedagogue, if you have not done anything worthy of being recorded, at least write something worthy of being read. It is a precept as beautiful as a diamond of the first water cut in England, but it cannot be applied to me, because I have not written either a novel, or the life of an illustrious character. Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life. I have lived without dreaming that I should ever take a fancy to write the history of my life, and, for that very reason, my Memoirs may claim from the reader an interest and a sympathy which they would not have obtained, had I always entertained the design to write them in my old age, and, still more, to publish them.

Giacomo Casanova

Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

William Lyon Phelps

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Edward Dahlberg

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Lawrence Clark Powell

The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

William Cobbett

When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.

Charlotte Mary Yonge

I do empathise with people who are driven by dreadful impulses. I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden. I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.

Open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government … The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something effective could be done.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The fact must never be forgotten that no magazine publisher in the United States could give what it is giving to the reader each month if it were not for the revenue which the advertiser brings the magazine. It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence. The American advertiser has made the superior American magazine of today possible

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.

Kingman Brewster, Jr.

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. The good type-designer therefore realizes that, for a new font to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty.

Stanley Morison

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer – reading is so much a part of it.

The newspaper fits the reader's program while the listener must fit the broadcaster's program.

Kingman Brewster, Jr.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.

George R. R. Martin

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

George F. Kennan

Dear reader, do you know the living God? Is He, in Jesus, your Father? Be assured that Christianity is something more than forms and creeds, and ceremonies: there is life, and power, and reality, in our holy faith.

If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.