Reader Quotes

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns. View quote
P. L. Travers
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. View quote
Margaret Fuller
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own. View quote
Salvatore Quasimodo
It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is. View quote
W. Somerset Maugham
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning. View quote
George F. Kennan
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! View quote
William Makepeace Thackeray
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. View quote
Robert Frost
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern. View quote
Henry Miller
Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them. View quote
Joseph Addison
A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. (Dean Acheson)
Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted. View quote
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother! View quote
Charles Baudelaire
A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: "If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!" View quote
M. R. James
I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer. View quote
Manuel Puig
Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page. View quote
Sidney Sheldon
Reader, I married him. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal woundthat he will never get over it. View quote
Robert Frost
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. (Robert Frost)
If you would be a reader, read if a writer, write. View quote
Epictetus
Reader, look Not on his picture, but his book. View quote
Ben Jonson
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. View quote
Joseph Addison
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss-you can't do it alone. View quote
John Cheever