Reader Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.

The thing about good pulp is that you trust the reader and you know that the mind is a machine to process metaphors so of course all those connections will be there. But you've also granted the fantastic its own dynamic and allowed that awe. There's no contradiction. So I want to have monsters as a metaphor but I also want monsters because monsters are cool. There's no contradiction.

China Miéville

Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.

A good sentence is a key. It unlocks the mind of the reader.

The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever's wrong in the merchant's business. If the truth isn't tellable, fix it so it is. That is about all there is to it.

John Emory Powers

The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.

Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal.

V. S. Pritchett

Will you come with me, sweet Reader? I thank you. Give me your hand.

Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book.

Jean Craighead George

The reader might reflect that an awful lot of supposing has to take place in order for the quantity theory of money to be true.

What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.

Man's life is like unto a winter's day,—
Some break their fast and so depart away;
Others stay dinner, then depart full fed;
The longest age but sups and goes to bed.
O reader, then behold and see!
As we are now, so must you be.

I cannot but here remind the reader of what Dr. Wiseman has shewn so strikingly in his lectures, how different new philosophic doctrines are apt to appear after we have become somewhat familiar with them.

Robert Chambers

They're often bracketed together, Tolkien and Lewis, which I suppose is fair because they were great friends — both Oxford writers and scholars, both Christians. Tolkien's work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature — Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad — the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that's what Tolkien's up to, he's left out half of it. The books are wholly male-oriented. The entire question of sexual relationships is omitted.

Reader, do you think it is a terrible thing to hope when there is really no reason to hope at all? Or is it (as the soldier said about happiness) something that you might just as well do, since, in the end, it really makes no difference to anyone but you?

Property is robbery! That is the war-cry of '93! That is the signal of revolutions!
Reader, calm yourself: I am no agent of discord, no firebrand of sedition. I anticipate history by a few days; I disclose a truth whose development we may try in vain to arrest; I write the preamble of our future constitution. This proposition which seems to you blasphemous — property is robbery — would, if our prejudices allowed us to consider it, be recognized as the lightning-rod to shield us from the coming thunderbolt; but too many interests stand in the way! … Alas! philosophy will not change the course of events: destiny will fulfill itself regardless of prophecy. Besides, must not justice be done and our education be finished?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Most true is it that "beauty is in the eye of the gazer." My master's colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, — all energy, decision, will, — were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, — that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

Charlotte Brontë

It has been well remarked of the poems of Hafiz, that their refreshing influence does not depend so much on the sense of the words as on the tone of mind produced in the reader.

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben

The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.

James J. Kilpatrick

I think Miss Moore was right to cut The Steeple-Jack — the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state — but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it? No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg.

Randall Jarrell

Siegried Sassoon's book is a true work of art. It is an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity that excites the reader.

We create an interior 'movie' in the reader's head through words on the page.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.