Reader Quotes - Page 23

• The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Party, Errors, Society

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2004). “Why I am So Wise”, p.79, Penguin UK

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• Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

  Hermann Hesse

  Writing, Literature, Growing

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• If you're going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won't be interesting to the reader.

  Beth Richardson Gutcheon

  Years, Two, Interesting

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• I love smart commercial fiction. Susan Isaacs, for example and the readers who interest me are, in the preponderance, women. I am one of them; I like the books they like.

  Beth Richardson Gutcheon

  Smart, Book, Example

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• There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Book, Writing

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.50, Penguin

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• People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

  E. M. Forster

  People, Wish, Novelists

  E. M. Forster (2010). “Aspects of the Novel”, p.74, RosettaBooks

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• The reader who is illuminated is, in a real sense, the poem.

  H. M. Tomlinson

  Real, Poetry

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• Few novels truly deserve the description 'rollicking' in the way Mary Novik's Conceit does. A hearty, boiling stew of a novel, served up in rich old-fashioned story-telling. Novik lures her readers into the streets of a bawdy seventeenth-century London with a nudge and a wink and keeps them there with her infectious love of detail and character. A raunchy, hugely entertaining read that will leave you at once satiated and hungry for more.

  Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Character, Details, Doe

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• With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Mistake, Writing, Style

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1851). “The prose works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, p.429

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• The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.

  Terry Brooks

  Character, Four, Want

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• Serving the reader by working cooperatively with the writer? Sometimes throwing 'the rules' out the window? Clearing the decks of pet peeves, mythical prohibitions and intractability? That is subversive. And welcome.

  Craig Lancaster

  Pet, Welcome, Sometimes

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• A presentation copy, reader,-if haply you are yet innocent of such favours-is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author.

  Charles Lamb

  Book, Doe, Favour

  Charles Lamb (1835). “Essays of Elia”, p.288

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• Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Gutenberg, Machines, Made

  Quoted in Wash. Post, 15 May 1977

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• The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

  James Fallows

  Design, Feelings, Google

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• It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Writing, Discipline

  "A Joy for Ever: And Its Price in the Market". Book by John Ruskin, note 6, 1857.

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• The goal for me is to pull in the reader and to have them ask questions.

  Lynsey Addario

  Goal, Asks

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• Indeed a good quotation hardly ever comes amiss. It is a pleasing break in the thread of a speech or writing, allowing the speaker or writer to retire for an instant while another and greater makes himself heard. And this calling-up of the deathless dead implies also a community of mind with them, which the reader will not grudge the author lest he should seem to deny it to himself.

  William Francis Henry King

  Writing, Community, Mind

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• What I deeply want... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self.

  Coleman Barks

  Ocean, Self, Space

  Coleman Barks (2010). “The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems”, p.14, Harper Collins

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• The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical terms and statistical methods are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense.

  Darrell Huff

  Honesty, Mean, Data

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• Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.

  W. H. Auden

  Writing, Intelligent, Doe

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• What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.

  T. S. Eliot

  Mean, Poetry, May

  T. S. Eliot (1986). “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England”, p.122, Harvard University Press

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• A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Fiction, Flow, Force

  E.L. Doctorow (2011). “Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992”, p.147, Random House

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• It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Avid, America, Fiction

  E.L. Doctorow (2011). “Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992”, p.110, Random House

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• A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.

  E. L. Doctorow

  May, Able

  "EL Doctorow: 'I don't have a style, but the books do'" by Sarah Crown, www.theguardian.com. January 22, 2010.

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• I would like the events never to be told directly by the author, but rather to be introduced (and several times, from various angles) by those among the characters on whom they will have had any effect. I would like those events, in the account they will make of them, to appear slightly distorted; a kind of interest stems, for the reader, from the simple fact that he should need to restore. The story requires his collaboration in order to properly take shape.

  Andre Gide

  Reading, Character, Simple

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