Reading Readers Writers Quotes & Sayings

Is it not a pity when some stylistic subtlety is lost without trace by the reader's inattention? — David Richards

I believe the best reviews are any of those wherein readers share their true opinion, no matter how many stars they rate my work. When I receive responses from appreciative people thanking for useful and amusing reading, it feels like my wings stretch up and blood carries the highest happiness circulating in my veins. I think many writers will understand what I mean by that. — Sahara Sanders

Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go. — Ann Brashares

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life. — Raymond Carver

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work. — Robert Frost

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing. — Pankaj Mishra

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves. — Lloyd Alexander

Far from being writers - founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses - readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. — Michel De Certeau

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

If the novel is dead, I'm a necrophiliac. — Tiffany Madison

Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer's is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page. — Kiese Laymon

He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn't deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies ... Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it. — Enrique Vila-Matas

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought. — Roger Angell

Reading is like magic--I think I've made my case. Without the gift of words, this world's a crazy place! — Denise Walter McConduit

All of us are writers reading other people's writing, turning pages or clicking to the next screen with pleasure and admiration. All of us absorb other people's words, feeling like we have gotten to know the authors personally in our own ways, even if just a tiny bit. True, we may also harbor jealousy or resentment, disbelief or disappointment. We may wish we had written those words ourselves or berate ourselves for knowing we never could or sigh with relief that we didn't, but thank goodness someone else has. — Pamela Paul

Look for your heros in the books people write, not in the people who write books. — Ozzie Cheek

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories ... The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would. — Elena Ferrante

Aren't we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they'll tell us that we make sense? — Rudy Francisco

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

Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique ... and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity - a bookish triumvirate. — Briar Kit Esme

Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people's imagination. — Henry James

Read different to think differently; world is already into rat race. — Aman Jassal

The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story — Brandt Legg

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS, — John Green

It's remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable. — Brandt Legg

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can. — John Green

Life ... is a bit like reading. ... If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing? — Julian Barnes

Cry while writing it, and readers will cry while reading it. — A.D. Posey

It feels to me as thought I've become the character in it, and the character's life ends when the books does. I suppose there are times I'm glad too. Then the ending is like coming out of a bad dream, and I feel all light and free, reborn. I sometimes wonder whether writers really know what they're doing to us readers. [...] I don't read much anymore [...] maybe for that reason. Because I didn't want books to have me in their power. It's like poison. I imagined I'd become immune. But you never become immune. On the contrary. — Peter Stamm

Statistically, if you're reading this sentence, you're an oddball. The average American spends three minutes a day reading a book. At this moment, you and I are engaged in an essentially antiquated interaction. Welcome, fellow Neanderthal! — Dick Meyer

Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers. — Steven Spielberg

when you read once, you get the understanding ; when you read twice, you get the second understanding. Don't just read, read! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Something significant, magical, and
inspiring happens with each word you read in the pages of a book. You explore new lands, meet new people, feel new emotions, and are no longer the same person you were one word prior to reading it. — Martha Sweeney

The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him. — R.M. Engelhardt

Literature is language charged with meaning — Ezra Pound

A writer is a reader moved to emulation. — Saul Bellow

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

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development - part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" - has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so - and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few - have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author. — James Shapiro

This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another. — John Hodgman

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened. — Annie Dillard

I have started a new blog W.A.R.(Writers Amongst Readers) for all those writing or reading books. Quotes, excerpts, comments from the world's greatest writers. See robinhawdonblog — Robin Hawdon

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse. — Robert Morgan

I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much. — Jerry Spinelli

The best gift you can give me is a book. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Great writers wield their words like a weapon; a double-edged sword to strike their readers with truth where they least expect it. -Matthew D. Forgenti — Matthew D. Forgenti

Texts on a lifeless strings of facts, but the keys to unlocking the character of human beings, people with likes and dislikes, diocese and foibles, errors and convictions. Words have texture and shape, and it is their almost tactile quality that leads readers to sculpt images of the writers who use them. These images are then interrogated, mocked, congratulated, or dismissed, depending on the context of the reading and the disposition of the reader. — Sam Wineburg

I believe that the phrase 'obligatory reading' is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of 'obligatory pleasure'? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek. 'Obligatory happiness'! [...] If a book bores you, leave it; don't read it because it is famous, don't read it because it is modern, don't read a book because it is old. If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is 'Paradise Lost' - which is not tedious to me - or 'Don Quixote' - which also is not tedious to me. But if a book is tedious to you, don't read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness, so I would advise all possible readers of my last will and testament - which I do not plan to write - I would advise them to read a lot, and not to get intimidated by writers' reputations, to continue to look for personal happiness, personal enjoyment. It is the only way to read. — Jorge Luis Borges

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know. — Alberto Manguel

I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away
first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one, and even when you're reading to a crowd, you're still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk. — Rebecca Solnit

You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book
if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it's not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading. — Philip Roth

When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check. — Kurt Vonnegut

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers. — Kurt Vonnegut

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone. — Shannon Celebi

Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of "character" or that kind of "character," and readers pretend to talk knowingly about "character," but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don't know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying. — Soseki Natsume

The great writers have always been great readers, but that does not mean that they read all the books that, in their day, were listed as the indispensable ones. In many cases, they read fewer books than are now required in most of our colleges, but what they did read, they read well. Because they had mastered these books, they became peers with their authors. They were entitled to become authorities in their own right. In the natural course of events, a good student frequently becomes a teacher, and so, too, a good reader becomes an author. — Mortimer J. Adler

Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone. — Thomas C. Foster

There are more writers who read than readers who write. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

How are you supposed to know what to read next? This is the question that keeps us up at night, so at Day One our mission is to feed an audience of literature-hungry, time-constrained readers like you with a weekly lineup of talented authors, poets, and artists that we believe you will love. And if we can identify some of the next generation of literary stars, and cultivate an appreciation for transformative poetry and fiction, then frankly we will sleep better at night. — Carmen Johnson

Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook) — Steven Heighton

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds — Niall Williams

Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault. — Pamela Sargent

If you write without reading, you will certainly have too many books without readers. — M.F. Moonzajer

Readers are the glue that binds the books together. — J.E.B. Spredemann

If words come alive on the page, the writer succeeds in connecting to the reader. — Aman Jassal

Reading about another era is like armchair time travel--without the baggage. — CJ Fosdick

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well. — Margaret Atwood

Only a true reader will understand how lovely it is to read a book on rainy days. — Nicholaa Spencer

The pages of a book are given life only as they are opened — L.J. DeVet

Reading had come to mean something new to the women of the fourth and later centuries. In the imagination, it is deeply linked to travel: both were methods by which an individual could explore the world. Equally, both were a way to nudge a person out of an unquestioning view of the world. Writers knew that readers were tightly bound within the network of relationships and obligations which governed their position in the Roman world, and one of the goals of literature was to persuade readers to adopt a more thoughtful approach to these commitments and relationships. — Kate Cooper

Don't read a book to let the time pass...let the time pass to read a book. — Nicholaa Spencer

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet. — Rebecca Solnit

The entire reason is gone, like the old-time writers who at some point found that very few people, if any, actually practiced reading anymore. But at least those writers had time, the change happening over many decades, until readers became rare enough that they were believed to be nearly extinct, like some twitchy, sensitive creatures who lingered in the twilight brush. — Chang-rae Lee

Reading, writing, and personal introspection will not protect us from hardship and suffering, but they might introduce us to critical thinking and expose us to what is good in humankind and beautiful in the world that we share with all of nature. Contemplative thought, especially that supplemented with reading literature and attempting to write our own replies to the echoing voices of writers whom preceded us provide us with the potentiality for change, the possibility of personal illumination that enables us to experience a heighted quality of life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren't there, but might be. And even that didn't matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there. They could bring their somethings to a text, as co-creators, embedding a needed reality in the story that, if it was flexible enough, would allow new threads to take their place beside the author's. — L.L. Barkat

Read, mediate and pray. — Lailah Gifty Akita

All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers. — Thomas Swick