Reader Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

Jorge Luis Borges

It is my object, in the following work, to travel over ground which has as yet been little explored and to make my reader acquainted with a species of Remains, which, though absolutely necessary for understanding the history of the globe, have been hitherto almost uniformly neglected.

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

My Dear Reader Chum, a very hearty hello to you. What an honour and privilege it is to have you perusing my written word.

Over and over again, medical writers liken withdrawal [from heroin], at worst, to a dose of flu. … Let me ask the reader this: if you were given a choice between suffering a bout of flu in the above sense, or avoiding it by robbing someone in the street or breaking into a house and stealing its contents, which would you choose?

Anthony Daniels

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

Alberto Manguel

Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.

Alberto Manguel

I am a slow reader, and fast eater; I wish it were the other way around.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Like all obsessions, Ballard's novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest. Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain. You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does.

So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty." This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic.

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

Marshall McLuhan

Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.

W. Somerset Maugham

Such humble talents as God had given me I will endeavour to put to their greatest use; if I am able to amuse, I will try to benefit too; and when I fell it my duty to speak unpalatable truth, with the help of God, I will speak it, through it be to the prejudice of my name and to the detriment of my reader's immediate pleasure as well as my own.

One thing that gains Parmenides a philosophers' merit-award, as the first principles story explained, is the idea of proving his point. Like others at the time, he wrote in magnificent poetry. That was nothing new and nothing strange. But what he wrote didn't just sound good or seem plausible; it also took the reader step by step through an argument. It aimed to demonstrate, without a shadow of doubt, that the conclusion had to be true if the initial assumptions were correct.

Catherine Rowett

I learn things from watching and listening to people. I'm not much of a reader; I'm slightly dyslexic.

Wendy Wasserstein

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

William Makepeace Thackeray

Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding places in a voluminous writer.

Think of the novel as lover: Let's stay home tonight and have a great time; just because you're touched where you want to be touched, it doesn't mean you're cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it. Or the novelist as cook who prepares, as a gift to the reader, this many-course meal. Not just ice cream, but broccoli rabe as well.

Jonathan Franzen

You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Reader, pray that soon this Iron Age
Will crumble, and Beauty escape the rusting cage.

Philip José Farmer

The reified focus on the moment of literary production, in a distanced context—the typical topic of periodization—suppresses the experience of reception, the actualization of the past in the reader's present.

The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which a good thing may pass over unobserved, or be lost among commissions of bankrupt.

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind—vividly, forcefully...

Samuel R. Delany

The attentive reader may have noticed that the core period of Jasper's Axial age—the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha—corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented.