Reader Quotations | Page 4

Narrators of first-person claptrap like this often greet the reader at the door with moist hugs and complaisant kisses. I won't. I will not endear myself.

It is blatantly obvious to even the most casual reader that Islamic terrorists have been, and continue to, cross the porous U.S./Mexico border into the United States.

I'm so focused on trying to craft the story that I'm in my own little world with it and that process. The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

Maybe storytelling belongs in audio - a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.

I'm a big reader, so I tend to already know the books when they're adapted into something.

I was a reader before I was a writer - one of those kids who walked home from school with a book up to my face, about to fall in the proverbial pothole because I couldn't see where I was going. And now I'm one of those people whose books are triple shelved and who can't go anywhere without carrying two titles - one that I'm reading and one backup.

We invite authors to communicate with their readers in a way that hasn't before been possible. Amazon Connect brings the author's message to the reader instead of waiting for the reader to find the message.

You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.

We know our poll drives business in the travel industry. Just the other day I got an e-mail from a reader who was planning her vacation, but before she made a decision she wanted to wait and see who won.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

When a novel has two hundred thousand words, then it is possible for the reader to experience two hundred thousand delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

The reader should come away convinced from this thesis that you actually did learn something,

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.

There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.

Every text assumes a reader.

I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

A book brings its own history to the reader.

The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.

Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.

Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

What I have always believed in 40 years of experience in the book publishing industry is that you can do what you want as a writer as long as you tell the reader what you are doing. Art is about honesty. My objection is not the use of memoir as literature it certainly can be. My objection is to the lack of honesty.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

Every reader of your ad is interested, else he would not be a reader. You are dealing with someone willing to listen. Then do your level best. That reader, if you lose him now, May never again be a reader

A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.

I was always a big reader, even when everything was bad and miserable.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

To make the reader afraid, I had to be afraid.

Unless you're a terribly bad writer, you are never going to have too many readers.

An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.

When I read, I'm purely a reader

The Bible - it's sort of the other person in the room. There's this book, the reader, and the Bible.

The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.

I really suggest the Pendragon series to all readers unless you are afraid of gore!

My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.

Invite the reader to participate by deciphering. Chaos can attract and engage.

I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.

It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look, and read.

Readers travel so fast they don't stop to decipher the meaning of obscure headlines.

I'm quite a slow reader. It can take me quite a while to get though a book.

A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.

There is a contract between the reader and the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash, and I have to entertain them.

When a young reader tells you that they'd never finished a book outside of school until they read yours, or that they really needed to hear something that one of your characters says or thinks... that's just rewarding and humbling.

Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.

Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.

The program is designed to collect and process green waste only, but your reader is correct that paper is compost-able as well.

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name.

First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Yes, we didn't do this -- we didn't produce these videotapes on time. My letter to Sen. Thompson made clear we should have found them. But the one thing that is absolutely clear is that the only pattern here is not one of incompetence -- and we don't make an incompetence defense -- the pattern here is one of an ongoing intensive day-to-day effort to try to meet the committee's needs and that is the only pattern a fair reader can see,

You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.

Write about what you care about. If you do that, you're probably going to do your best writing, reach off the page and touch the reader. How are you going to make the reader care if you don't care yourself?

There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It's an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.

What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.

You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.

This test provides an important opportunity to work with our international partners...to put in place an e-Passport reader solution by the end of fall (September--November) of this year.

When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.

What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader's part.

We try not to be all things to all women. You'll never find anything about babies in our magazine, except what a single reader might be interested in.

We certainly like to believe that as rich media is being consumed more on these devices ... that both Flash and Reader become essential part of these devices ... We are vigilant to make it happen.

It is hard news that catches readers. Features hold them.

Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

Corrupt fantasy points us, or forms us, in a consciousness that can lead to thinking that evil is good and good is evil. In the worst case, this may have long range effects, prompting the reader intuitively, subconsciously, to do evil while thinking they're doing good.

Endings are the toughest, harder than beginnings. They must satisfy the expectations you have hopefully generated in your reader - not frustrate them, leave the reader grasping at elusive strings.

Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.

First of all, Reader has utility beyond digitized books, incorporating features that permit consumers to download and read personal documents and capture Internet content. As a result, users can carry around a wide variety of reading materials, including books, Internet content, and personal/business files in one small device.

I should love to do a novel... about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.

The worst headline is one that contains a factual error. Bad headlines are ones that are bland, and don't tell the reader anything specific, like 'Democrats at it Again.'

The writer does the most good who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

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.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

These books are feeding that same reader who has been starved for more books like The D a Vinci Code .

The storm clouds had been building. Mr. Klein is a great reader of the political signs and he must have known in his heart it was time to go. He has a chance to go out on his own steam or be pushed out.

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.

I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.

San Francisco is a classic bike town, and it is beloved by everybody. In our online reader poll, more readers chose San Francisco than any other city but Portland. There is a culture of cycling ? there are bike clubs, there's the messenger culture and there are long-standing community activities centered around cycling.

Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down.

Our customer service team says CD-RW discs do not have an infinite rewrite lifespan and can only be erased and rewritten so many times. It may be wise for your reader to try a new CD-RW disk.

After Sept. 11, I didn't write a piece for a couple of days because I thought people wouldn't want me to be funny. This time, it was so obvious what could be written, and I'll continue to write it. I can usually gauge reader response from the number of people who cancel on my e-mail list, and there's been no major withdrawal.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

A reader's own imagination is a far more powerful form of CGI than anything any movie can provide because it's unique. In your own imagination, you can enter all sorts of worlds, and they are unique to you because no other reader will interpret a book the same way.

A reader's eyes may glaze over after they take in a couple of paragraphs about Canadian tariffs or political developments in Pakistan; a story about the reader himself or his neighbors will be read to the end.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

A novel invites digression and a little relaxation of the grip because a reader can't endure being held that tightly in hand for so long a time.

As for characters, I think that very little is needed. You just give a hint and the reader will make up the character on his or her own.

As authors, we all have to learn not to be reactive to public statements about our books. It's really not our business what each reader thinks of them.

A writer loses possession of her work as soon as it's reaches its audience. Each reader brings his own experience and prejudice and imagination to the work. Television adaptation just goes one step further, and the novelist has to learn to let go.

Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.