Reader Quotes - page 3

Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book. (Helen Dunmore)
I'm also looking for gems that the average reader might have missed. View quote
Terri Windling
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader. View quote
John Updike
I am obliged to deal with hundreds of men and to make them live without killing the reader. View quote
George Sarton
The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it. View quote
Norman Cousins
The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader. View quote
Edward Gibbon
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool. View quote
Steven Brust
It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact, out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one. View quote
John Ruskin
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time. (E. M. Forster)
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. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
... coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes. View quote
David Mermin
If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion. View quote
Eudora Welty
There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy than connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply...the person who wants to read what I have written. View quote
Will Self
A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters. View quote
T. E. Hulme
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero. View quote
Mary McCarthy
When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. View quote
Anne Lamott
I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him. (Tom Stoppard)
Reader, pray that soon this Iron Age Will crumble, and Beauty escape the rusting cage. View quote
Philip José Farmer
To write and speak correctly is certainly necessary; but it is not sufficient. A derivation correctly presented in the book or on the blackboard may be inaccessible and uninstructive, if the purpose of the successive steps is incomprehensible, if the reader or listener cannot understand how it was humanly possible to find such an argument.... View quote
George Pólya
I want a kiss to be so believable it give the reader shivers. View quote
Laurell K. Hamilton
So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads. View quote
Dr. Seuss