Quotes & Sayings About Readers Digest

If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming 'Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese? — Stephen King

As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature. — Cao Yu

Beyond Words is an exceptionally useful and inspiring digest of Dzogchen (Great Perfection) teachings and the teachers associated with them. The ancient prediction that Dzogchen would benefit many during these degenerate times, makes this comprehensive introduction especially relevant. The authors have made these profound teachings accessible and Beyond Words will be useful to both inexperienced and seasoned readers. — Tsultrim Allione

I'll tell you a thing that will shock you. It will certainly shock the readers of Writer's Digest. What I often do nowadays when I have to, say, describe a room, is to take a page of a dictionary, any page at all, and see if with the words suggested by that one page in the dictionary I can build up a room, build up a scene. ... I even did it in a novel I wrote called MF. There's a description of a hotel vestibule whose properties are derived from Page 167 in R.J. Wilkinson's Malay-English Dictionary. Nobody has noticed. ... As most things in life are arbitrary anyway, you're not doing anything naughty, you're really normally doing what nature does, you're just making an entity out of the elements. I do recommend it to young writers. — Anthony Burgess

Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts - eighteenth-century Reader's Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for "delicious morsels," one that spits out "every thing which is plain." Good books, in contrast, require good readers: "In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them. — Karen Swallow Prior

I'm recapitulating ... condensing ... it's the Readers Digest style ... people only have time to read thirty pages ... apparently! ... maximum! ... that's all they have time for! they horse around for sixteen hours out of twenty-four, they sleep, they copulate the rest, where would they find the time to read a hundred pages? oh, do caca, I forgot! as well! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

As the Readers's Digest once said: 'Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience. — Dale Carnegie

Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be - if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking - but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don't pass it up. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don't pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts.
Lorraine Hansberry speech, "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black," given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964. — Lorraine Hansberry