Reader Quotes - Page 40

• The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.

  George Steiner

  Heart, Musical, Clarity

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.9, Faber & Faber

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• If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Book, Reading, Kind

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• I like delivering a message, but what I find interesting is providing those details in a different context. Then the readers can make up their minds what it means.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Mean, Interesting, Mind

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Readable text and authority so that readers know how to spend - no matter how much information there is, I have the same number of minutes in my day, and I need to look to sources that I trust.

  David Gelernter

  Numbers, Needs, Looks

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I'm a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.

  Primo Levi

  Memories, Men, Clothes

  "The Mirror Maker" by Primo Levi, ("The Premise"), 1986.

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• Nature is my religion. And my desire...my ambition...the great goal I wish to achieve is to take my readers with me into the heart of this Nature. I love it, and I feel that they must love it......if I can only get the two acquainted.

  James Oliver Curwood

  Heart, Ambition, Two

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• Pulls readers in with an ironic, breezy portrait of sinister high school competitiveness. Deft and extraordinarily accomplished.

  Michael Cadnum

  School, Ironic, Portraits

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• I've come to accept who my readers turn out to be, rather than having some sort of demographic target.

  Simon Winchester

  Target, Accepting, Demographics

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• Along with responsible newspapers we must have responsible readers.

  Arthur Hays Sulzberger

  Responsible, Newspapers

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• Full of fun, over-the-top characters and witty prose, with a touch of gay romance that is equally pleasing to straight readers. The Edwin Drood Murders is the perfect mystery for educated, intelligent readers.

  Rhys Bowen

  Witty, Fun, Character

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• Women are books, and men the readers be, Who sometimes in those books erratas see; Yet oft the reader's raptured with each line, Fair print and paper, fraught with sense divine; Tho' some, neglectful, seldom care to read, And faithful wives no more than bibles heed. Are women books? says Hodge, then would mine were An Almanack, to change her every year.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Women, Book, Years

  Benjamin Franklin (2007). “Poor Richard's Almanack”, p.115, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• At some point, every science fiction and fantasy story must challenge the reader's experience and learning. That's much of the reason why the genre is so open to experimentation and innovation that other genres reject--strangeness is our bread and butter. Spread it thick or slice it thin, it's still our staff of life.

  Orson Scott Card

  Genre Is, Challenges, Innovation

  Orson Scott Card, Terry Brooks (2010). “The Writer's Digest Guide to Science Fiction & Fantasy”, p.21, Writer's Digest Books

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• When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Shapes, Patterns

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.21, HarperCollins UK

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• I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me.

  Tom Robbins

  Reading, Thinking, Focus

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• I think Miss Moore was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack" - the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, "Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it?" No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg.

  Randall Jarrell

  Cutting, Thinking, Long Ago

  "Poetry and the Age". Book by Randall Jarrell. Chapter: "Her Shield", p. 177, 1953.

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• Goethe said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing"; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary." These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.

  Randall Jarrell

  Different, Lexicon, Looks

  "No Other Book: Selected Essays". Book by Randall Jarrell. Chapter: "The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 13, 1999.

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• Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even - "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.

  Randall Jarrell

  Reading, Air, Faithful

  "No Other Book: Selected Essays". Book by Randall Jarrell. Chapter: "To the Laodiceans", p. 21, 1999.

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• There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.

  Randall Jarrell

  Attitude, Doubt, Might

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry" (p. 131), 1969.

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• Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change.

  Randall Jarrell

  Determination, Attitude, Writing

  "Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (p. 237), 1955.

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• Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, "That were to consider it too curiously.

  Randall Jarrell

  Interesting, Upside Down, Poet

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens" (p. 64), 1969.

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• Absolutists frighten me. During all the endless discussions on my blog about evolution, intelligent design, God, and the afterworld, numbering altogether thousands of comments, I have never named my beliefs, although readers have freely informed me that I am an atheist, and agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist - which I am.

  Roger Ebert

  Atheist, Intelligent, Design

  "Life Itself : A Memoir". Book by Roger Ebert, 2011.

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• It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Moving

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• Just think, reader, what will happen to you if the truth of a mad beast overpowers the sane truth of man?

  Maxim Gorky

  Truth, Men, Thinking

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• The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.

  Marcel Theroux

  Book, Mind, Needs

  Marcel Theroux (2013). “Strange Bodies”, p.37, Faber & Faber

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• My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it.

  Mary Rodgers

  Mother, Loneliness, Book

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