Reader Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Good writing is difficult no matter what the reader's age-and children deserve the best.

The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader's eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.

Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue, or mosque you may belong! See if you do not find more true religion among the host of the excommunicated than among the far greater host who excommunicated them.

Moses Mendelssohn

I end with a word on the new symbols which I have employed. Most writers on logic strongly object to all symbols.... I should advise the reader not to make up his mind on this point until he has well weighed two facts which nobody disputes, both separately and in connexion. First, logic is the only science which has made no progress since the revival of letters; secondly, logic is the only science which has produced no growth of symbols.

Augustus De Morgan

There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.

H. P. Lovecraft

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

Study your reader first - your product second. If you understand his reactions, and present those phases of your product that relate to his needs, then you cannot help but write a good letter.

Robert Collier (author)

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

Thomas De Quincey

Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey.

W. Somerset Maugham

The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the text.

Louise Rosenblatt

Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment call, since what is possible and what is not cannot be objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the reader.

If the reader has once fully grasped that science is an intellectual resume of past experience and a mental balancing of the probability of future experience, he will be in no danger of contrasting the "mechanical explanation" of science with the "intellectual description" of mythology.

Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.

Never compare one student's test score to another's. Always measure a child's progress against her past performance. There will always be a better reader, mathematician, or baseball player. Our goal is to help each student become as special as she can be as an individual--not to be more special than the kid sitting next to her.

In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.

Oliver Goldsmith

Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion; worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.

Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing. You want short sentences and long sentences—well, every writer knows that. You have to develop a certain ease of delivery and make your writing agreeable to read.

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

In a comic novel, the language has to stay perky so the reader will keep laughing. And yet it sort of defies making it deep, so it's hard to make it both funny and profound, comic and deep, all at the same time.

Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem . . . some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.

The voice is part of your body, it needs your presence. You speak, you have a dialogue, you correct, you give further explanations. Writing, on the other hand, only needs a reader. It doesn't need you.

The writer does not and should not have the last word. That belongs to the reader.

A cultivated reader of history is domesticated in all families; he dines with Pericles, and sups with Titian.

Robert Aris Willmott

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.