Reader Quotes - Page 18

• Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

  Walter Mosley

  War, Heart, Fighting

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• Whether the author intended a symbolic resonance to exist in her book is irrelevant. All that matters is whether it's there. Because the book does not exist for the benefit of the author, the book exists for the benefit of YOU. If we as readers can have a bigger and richer experience with the world as a result of reading a symbol and that symbol wasn't intended by the author, WE STILL WIN.

  John Green

  Book, Reading, Winning

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• I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.

  Helen Garner

  Book, Thinking, People

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• All those who love thrillers will find in Michael Alexiades's first novel a source of great pleasure and satisfaction. It combines suspense and knowledge, experience and imagination. His grateful readers will now wait for the next.

  Elie Wiesel

  Grateful, Imagination, Waiting

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• It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, worldview and thoughts.

  Annie Proulx

  Views, Feelings, Prejudice

  "Close Range". Interview with Matthew Testa, www.cityweekly.net. June 11, 2007.

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• But it has also enabled me to find my feet as a lecturer and a reader of my own plays to audiences who like to hear them; and that experience of immediate appreciation gives greater pleasure and more stimulus towards further activity than even the most laudatory of reviews.

  Laurence Housman

  Appreciation, Play, Feet

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• Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

  Carolyn Heilbrun

  Believe, Struggle, Writing

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• I've long come to the conclusion that when people say they can't put a book down, they don't mean they're interested in what's happening next; they mean they are so mesmerised by the writer's voice and the relationship that has been established that they don't want to break that. That's what I feel when I read, and I'm sure now that that's what's going on in the relationship between the reader and the writing.

  David Malouf

  Art, Book, Writing

  "David Malouf - 'Dream Stuff'". Interview with Ramona Koval, www.abc.net.au. April 14, 2000.

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• Buddha's Wife tells a fascinating story, little known in the west, about the woman whom Buddha left behind. Gabriel Constans focuses the reader's attention on the strong and complicated women who surrounded Buddha and makes us re-think the nature of spiritual life.

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  Spiritual, Strong, Book

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• A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.

  Joseph Addison

  Book, Men, Black

  'The Spectator' no. 1, 1 March 1711

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• I live in the same house I’ve lived in for 25 years. I haven’t gone off and bought mansions, you know, even though my subject is living… living in a mansion wouldn’t do for my readers. I have to keep my credibility alive with my readers, so we’re in the same place. I just make that place nicer and nicer. And… and that’s a secret. And people don’t know that. People think, oh, she lives in this fabulous place, it’s the same old place. It started out like a farm, it got to be a farmette, then it got to be an estatelet. I built a wall, it helped a lot. But it’s the same place, the same grounded nature.

  Martha Stewart

  Wall, Thinking, Years

  "Discovering Everyday Good Things". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 2, 1995.

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• As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.

  Stephen King

  Character, Worry, Stories

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• The Word God wastes nothing and He heals two broken hearts with one story - the reader and the writer.

  Ann Voskamp

  Heart, Two, Broken

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• David Agus is one of America's great doctors and medical researchers, a man dedicated to improving the health of as many people as he can. Written in a style and format that will truly engage readers, The End of Illness presents a dramatic, new way of thinking about our own health-a way that could lead to greatly improving the quality of life for millions, starting right now.

  Al Gore

  Men, Thinking, America

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• 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.

  John Updike

  Struggle, Editors, Class

  FaceBook post by John Updike from Dec 30, 2014

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• Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Writing

  Mohsin Hamid (2013). “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel”, p.44, Penguin

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• One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.

  H. L. Mencken

  Smart, Thousand

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• But satire, ever moral, ever new, Delights the reader and instructs him, too. She, if good sense refine her sterling page, Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.

  Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

  Age, Delight, Moral

  "Satires (Satire 9)". Book by Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, 1716.

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• There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.

  Clifton Fadiman

  Morning, Book, Hot

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• As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.

  Tahir Shah

  Travel, Fear, Hair

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• In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.

  Anton Chekhov

  Writing, Eye, Details

  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1987). “The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings”

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• I want 'Vogue' to be pacy, sharp, and sexy - I'm not interested in the super-rich or infinitely leisured. I want our readers to be energetic executive women, with money of their own and a wide range of interests. There is a new kind of woman out there. She's interested in business and money.

  Anna Wintour

  Sexy, Want, Kind

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• My Family and Other Saints echoes Gerald Durrell's classic memoir, My Family and Other Animals, not only in its title, but in its wonderful humor and lyrical prose. Like Durrell, Kirin Narayan takes the reader to a fascinating world far from our own, and brings to life its myriad sights, sounds and smells, while revealing the profound cultural beliefs of its people. India is just the most complex character among a cast of characters-family members, gurus, hippies, and neighbors-all of whom I now count as old friends.

  Judith Barrington

  Hippie, Character, Animal

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• The only thing I hope for is that, regardless of what the outward world is for different people, different nations, I hope their internal world is similar. And if I, hopefully, have managed to somehow describe my inner world in this book, all I count on is that it will have some resonance among the American readers, or, at the very least, the American readers will treat this book as a kind of a guidebook for my inner world, strange as it may appear.

  Vera Pavlova

  Book, People, Different

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• Frederick Buechner brings the reader to his knees, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in an astonishment very close to prayer, and at the best of times in a combination of both.

  Michael Mewshaw

  Laughter, Prayer, Astonishment

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