Reader Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

What is possible and what is not possible is not objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the author and of the reader.

An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.

Amos Bronson Alcott

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.

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 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.

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

Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

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

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.

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.

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

Philip José Farmer

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

The test of good prose is that the reader does not notice it any more than a man looking through a window at a landscape notices the glass.

I propose to myself to imitate, and as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men…I wish to keep my reader in the company of flesh and blood.

William Wordsworth

The Reader's Bill of Rights: The right to not read... to skip pages... to not finish... to reread... to read anything. to escapism. to read anywhere. to browse. to read out loud. to not defend your tastes.

In pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust.

Vladimir Nabokov

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person — a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.