Reader Quotes - Page 26

• Writing isn't just on the page; it's voices in the reader's head. Read what you write out loud to someone-anyone-and you will catch all kinds of things.

  Donna Jo Napoli

  Writing, Voice, Pages

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• Honestly, when you start talking about genres, you're talking as much about the business side of writing as anything else. Certainly there are elements of reader expectation that play into various genres, and those are important, but it also becomes about packaging, placement, audience....In the end, I'm not a fan of labels. I think the best fiction blurs the boundaries between genres, stretches and breaks them.

  Kristin Hannah

  Writing, Thinking, Play

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• One of the many lessons I hope I've learned is how much I underestimated people, their open-mindedness and their willingness to understand. I think, moreover, I underestimated the degree to which everyone has a story. So my advice, for whatever it's worth, is to trust readers, trust the truth and trust the power of storytelling.

  Jeannette Walls

  Writing, Thinking, People

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• The most enjoyable part in writing a series is being able to visit a world I have created and revisit old friends. The challenges are making the book fresh and new for readers who have started from the beginning while still adding old information for new readers.

  Christine Feehan

  Book, Writing, Challenges

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• You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.

  Terry Brooks

  Writing, Remember You, Remembers You

  Terry Brooks (2003). “Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life”, p.116, Del Rey

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• I really care about my readers. I care about anyone who reads my books.

  Jan Karon

  Book, Care, I Care

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• I try to put my heart out there to everybody. They don't have to be Christian. For example, I have lots of Jewish readers. I love my Jewish readers.

  Jan Karon

  Christian, Heart, Trying

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• I've put everything I had and I've given my readers 120 percent, and that's the truth.

  Jan Karon

  Given, Percent

  "Leaving Mitford: Jan Karon on Life and Writing". Interview with Belinda Elliot, www.cbn.com.

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• There are so many people who don't know small towns exist. When I write, I want to give my readers two things: one is a sense of consolation, and two, I want to make them laugh.

  Jan Karon

  Writing, Two, People

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• I'm an equal opportunity reader - although I don't much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.

  Richard Ford

  Opportunity, Play, Guilty

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• For many years I thought my job was to go to places where it would be difficult for most of the readers to ever get to. Now, in the more than 20 years I've been doing this, the concept of adventure-travel trips or expeditions by groups has sprung up. The places I went 20 years ago now have adventure-travel trips.

  Tim Cahill

  Jobs, Adventure, Sprung Up

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• You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

  Ian Mcewan

  Writing, Men, Passivity Is

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• What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim "You know exactly what I mean!" depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.

  Will Self

  Character, Mean, Class

  "Incidents along the road" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 6, 2009.

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• It's what the reader thinks that counts.

  Tibor Fischer

  Thinking

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• I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

  Diane Wakoski

  Reading, Thinking, People

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• I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

  Nicholson Baker

  Book, Years, Fickle

  Nicholson Baker (2012). “The Way the World Works”, p.208, Simon and Schuster

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• Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Depressing, Culture Religion, Criticism

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• Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.

  Mitch Albom

  Writing, Problem, Critics

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• I seem to have very few casual readers, only passionate and appreciative ones.

  Mitch Albom

  Passionate, Appreciative, Casual

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• The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

  David Foster Wallace

  Eye, Purpose, Hush

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• Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.

  James Buchan

  Cutting, Pages, Firsts

  "Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann". www.theguardian.com. September 11, 2009.

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• My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?"

  Janet Fitch

  Father, Book, Two

  Interview with Oprah Winfrey, www.oprah.com. September, 2006.

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• I've always been interested in gadgets and technology and I've always been a reader.

  LeVar Burton

  Technology, Gadgets

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

  Terry Eagleton

  Book, Reading, Space

  "Against The Grain". Book by Terry Eagleton, 1986.

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• Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other.

  Ernesto Sabato

  Dream, Book, Office

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