Reader Quotes - Page 31

• Tell the story that's in your heart, and don't hold back. Write a book the reader will want to melt into.

  Susan Wiggs

  Book, Writing, Heart

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• Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.

  Mitch Albom

  Running, Book, Character

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• Take my advice, dear reader, don’t talk epigrams even if you have the gift. I know, to those have, the temptation is almost irresistible. But resist it. Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to be somewhat chiselled, as it were, before it will quite fit into an epigram.

  Joseph P. Farrell

  Advice, Temptation, Fit

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• I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Fiction, Lines, Facts

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• A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Book, Reading, Air

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• It is no use describing a house; the reader will fix the scene in some spot he knows himself.

  J. Milton Hayes

  House, Scene, Spots

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• Libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide - between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.

  Bella Bathurst

  Children, Powerful, Book

  "The secret life of libraries" by Bella Bathurst, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2011.

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• I... recommend to every one of my Readers, the keeping a Journal of their Lives for one Week, and setting down punctually their whole Series of Employments during that Space of Time. This kind of Self-Examination would give them a true State of themselves, and incline them to consider seriously what they are about. One Day would rectifie the Omissions of another, and make a Man weigh all those indifferent Actions, which, though they are easily forgotten, must certainly be accounted for.

  Joseph Addison

  Men, Space, Omission

  Joseph Addison (1804). “The works of ... Joseph Addison, collected by mr. Tickell”, p.271

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• My readers, who may at first be apt to consider Quotation as downright pedantry, will be surprised when I assure them, that next to the simple imitation of sounds and gestures, Quotation is the most natural and most frequent habitude of human nature. For, Quotation must not be confined to passages adduced out of authors. He who cites the opinion, or remark, or saying of another, whether it has been written or spoken, is certainly one who quotes; and this we shall find to be universally practiced.

  James Boswell

  Simple, Next, Firsts

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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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• You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

  Horace

  Art, Reading, Mean

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• The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

  John Ciardi

  Reading, Writing, Poetry

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• An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Art, Writing, Expression

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• 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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• 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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• When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

  Tracy Kidder

  Believe, Stories

  Tracy Kidder, Richard Todd (2013). “Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction”, p.81, Random House

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.

  John Green

  Book, Online, Conversation

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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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• I think the invitation offered the non-black reader is to join us in this expression of our familiarity and via that joining, come to understand that when black people come together to celebrate and rejoice in black critical thinking, we do so not to exclude or to separate, but to participate more fully in world community. However, we must first be able to dialogue with one another, to give one another subject-to-subject recognition that is an act of resistance that is part of the decolonizing, anti-racist process.

  Bell Hooks

  Thinking, Expression, Giving

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