Reader Quotes - Page 11

• For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News.

  Gloria Steinem

  Book, Reading, News

  "Valley of the Dolls doesn't have to stay relevant to be a camp classic" by Judy Berman, www.theguardian.com. July 12, 2016.

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• There are only two kinds of Wodehouse readers, those who adore him and those who have never read him.

  Richard Usborne

  Reading, Two, Kind

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• Every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible

  Samuel Johnson

  Reading, Remember, Injury

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1857). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.319

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• Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Special, Advertising, Realizing

  Fran Lebowitz (2011). “The Fran Lebowitz Reader”, p.159, Vintage

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• I have often wondered how anyone who does not read, by which I mean daily, having some book going all the time, can make it through life. Indeed if I were required to make a sharp division in the very nature of people, I would be tempted to make it there: readers and nonreaders of books... It is astonishing how the presence or absence of this habit so consistently characterizes an individual in other respects; it is as though it were a kind of barometer of temperament, of personality, even of character. Aside from that, for me it constituted something like sanity insurance.

  William Brinkley

  Book, Character, Mean

  William Brinkley (2013). “The Last Ship: A Novel”, p.65, Penguin

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• A Wired reader told me once, Get a life, which I read from the back of a yacht in the Aegean, while eating fresh sea urchins and drinking terrific Montrachet.

  Nicholas Negroponte

  Drinking, Sea, Design

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• (3) 'IS IT A SYSTEM...?' ... Ultimately, I suspect, this is a question about which the reader should form his own judgement by study of the original text.

  Raymond Keene

  Judgement, Chess, Study

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• Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.

  Neville Cardus

  May, Entertainment, Distrust

  Neville Cardus (2012). “Autobiography”, p.56, Faber & Faber

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• Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance are the writers who take advantage of present incidents or characters which strongly interest the passions, and engage universal attention. It is not difficult to obtain readers, when we discuss a question which every one is desirous to understand, which is debated in every assembly, and has divided the nation into parties; or when we display the faults or virtues of him whose public conduct has made almost every man his enemy or his friend.

  Samuel Johnson

  Party, Reading, Passion

  Samuel Johnson (1848). “The Wisdom of the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler”, p.379

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• Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Change, Reading, Entertainment

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• There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.

  Robert Frost

  Life, Motivation, Heart

  Robert Frost, Mark Richardson (2007). “The Collected Prose of Robert Frost”, p.301, Harvard University Press

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• The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

  Susan Sontag

  Writing, Heart, Stories

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.407, Macmillan

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• I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

  Annie Proulx

  Writing, Thinking, Space

  "Annie Proulx regrets writing Brokeback Mountain? She needs to let it go" by Ryan Gilbey, www.theguardian.com. December 29, 2014.

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• I don't want the reader to be aware of me as the writer.

  Elmore Leonard

  Writing, Want

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• Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers - and at some point the distinction should become meaningless.

  Nick Denton

  Collaboration, Should, Distinction

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• If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

  Theodora Goss

  Writing, Firsts, Wonderful

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• With humor, it’s so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.

  Calvin Trillin

  Crazy, Thinking, Trying

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• I was not a big comic-book reader.

  Brad Bird

  Book, Comic, Bigs

  "We Shine the Spotlight on ARROW Star Grant Gustin". Interview with Tiffany Vogt, www.thetvaddict.com. January 15, 2014.

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• My goal is to teach readers how to treat and respect themselves and each other in an entertaining way. I do that in all of my books.

  Lisi Harrison

  Book, Goal, Way

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• To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.

  John Cowper Powys

  Book, Mean, People

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• Freedom of speech trumps political correctness. I would say our magazine would publish an anti-Semitic or Holocaust denying cartoon if it meant Jews around the world were rioting because of it and burning embassies because of a cartoon. We would want to show our readers what all the fuss was about.

  Ezra Levant

  Holocaust, Political, Freedom Of Speech

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• Terry Farish seems to breathe the reader into the emotional spaces of war, exile, and refugee life. The Good Braider is a delicate stunning exploration of its young protagonist's life and heart.

  Uma Krishnaswami

  War, Heart, Emotional

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• The clever reader who is capable or reading between these lines what does not stand written in them but is nevertheless implied will be able to form some conception.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Clever, Reading, Reality

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• I have written 20 books, and each one is like having a baby. Writing is not easy; some people want to write books but just can't put a story together. I can put together a story that interests both me and my readers.

  Jackie Collins

  Baby, Book, Writing

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• Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another.

  Bruce Holland Rogers

  Art, Book, Perfect

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