Reader Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The modest front of this small floor,
Believe me, reader, can say more
Than many a braver marble can,—
Here lies a truly honest man!

Richard Crashaw

Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.

George V. Higgins

You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives,... but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.

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.

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.

You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arms, like a drunk, and say, And then I did this and it was so interesting.

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.

I hope I have seduced the reader to consider that we have in front of us the possibility of an open-ended quest for resonant passages between human experience and cognitive science. The price however is to take first-person accounts seriously as valid domain of phenomena. And beyond that, to build a sustained tradition of phenomenological examination that is almost entirely nonexistent today in our western science and culture at large.

Francisco Varela

Thou shalt infect thy reader with anxiety, stress, and tension, for these conditions that he deplores in life he relishes in fiction.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

Jorge Luis Borges

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does.

Douglas Coupland

I think it right to warn my reader, that there are more passages than one in the book, which are of that nature, which will be perfectly understood by my Masonic friends, but which my engagements prevent me explaining to the world at large. My Masonic friends will find their craft very often referred to. I believe, however that they will not find any of their secrets betrayed; but I trust they will find it proved, that their art is the remains of a very fine ancient system, or, perhaps, more properly, a branch of the fine and beautiful system of WISDOM which, in this work, I have developed.

Godfrey Higgins

I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.

But satire, ever moral, ever new,
Delights the reader and instructs him, too.
She, if good sense refine her sterling page,
Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Reader, I must confess that while attending the sneak preview with its overwhelmingly female audience, I was gob-smacked by the delightful cleavage on display. Do women wear their lowest-cut frocks for each other?

One of the stranger beliefs in science fiction is a passionate belief in Beautiful Writing—lots and lots of extraspecial exciting words thrown no hurled no CASCADED upon the reader in a shimmering shower of precious verbal gleaming gleanings and a singing pillar of righteous fiery syntactic spinach. The only thing that was good in that sentence was the spinach, and the hell with it.

I hope that the reader will not regard the contents of this book as an escape from the present world but rather as a key part of it.

Cyrus H. Gordon

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.

The sphinx atropos squeakes when hurt, nearly as loud as a mouse, which, when uttered in the most plaintive tone, naturally shocks the human heart, and makes it shudder at the thought of destroying inoffensive animals merely for the sake of curiosity. I cannot help reflecting on this tyranny, this wanton cruelty, exercised by thoughtless man, on many animals but especially in insects: 'tis certain, that every animal possessing life, has feeling; and, therefore, is as capable of suffering pain, as of enjoying pleasure; and, as Shakespeare humanely expresses The poor beetle crushed beneath the foot, feels the pangs of death as great as when a monarch falls. Gentle reader, pardon this digression, my feelings commanded my pen.

When I created Quirke, he was 6ft 6in and blond. But then a woman reader wrote to me and said, 'Why do you keep saying his hair is blond? It's not. It's brown.' I wrote back to her and told her that, of course, she was right. So I darkened his hair and now that he's being played by Gabriel Byrne; with each successive book he gets a bit smaller and smaller.

You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.