Quotes about reader page 2
“Hypocrite reader — my likeness — my brother!”
Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal
Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! <br class="br">"Au Lecteur" [To the Reader] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Au_lecteur_%28Les_Fleurs_du_mal%29 <br class="br">Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
“I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author
Source: The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer
Source: Education of a Wandering Man
Samuel R. Delany (1942) American author, professor and literary critic
Source: About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews
“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.”
John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer
Christian Science Monitor (October 24, 1979).
“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”
Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books
“Not all readers become leaders, but all leaders must be readers.”
Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)
Variant: Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.
“Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.”
Scott Westerfeld (1963) American science fiction writer
“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
A Review http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/jenyns.html of Soame Jenyns' A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, published in the first volume of Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces (London, 1774), p. 23
“Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.”
Mohsin Hamid book How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
Source: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
Stephen King (1947) American author
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist
Paris Review Interview (1986)
Context: You ask 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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Success
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870)
“She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.”
Barbara Pym book Quartet in Autumn
Source: Quartet in Autumn
Kathy Acker (1947–1997) American novelist, playwright, essayist, and poet
"On Delany the Magician", a foreword to Trouble on Triton (1996) by Samuel R. Delany, and reprinted in Acker's collection Bodies of Work (1996)
Source: Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
Context: Every book, remember, is dead until a reader activates it by reading. Every time that you read you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies. Aeneas did. Odysseus did. Listen to Delany, a prophet.
“The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.”
Jodi Picoult (1966) Author
Source: Between the Lines
“I am a slow reader, and fast eater; I wish it were the other way around.”
Amy Krouse Rosenthal (1965–2017) author, a radio show host and producer, and filmmaker
Source: Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist
“Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.”
Alberto Manguel (1948) writer
Source: The Library at Night
Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White
Source: Collins explaining what he calls the literary principal guiding him, in the preface of the second edition of The Woman in White. Also in Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins by Maria K. Bachman & Don Richard Cox [University of Tennessee Press, 2003, ISBN 1-572-33274-3] ( p. xiv https://books.google.com/books?id=_X8AlmIp0dwC&pg=PR14)
Jayne Ann Krentz (1948) American novelist
“I hope that the kind reader recognises this as a despairing attempt at humour.”
Nancy Springer (1948) American author of fantasy, young adult literature, mystery, and science fiction
Sarah Caudwell (1939–2000) English barrister and writer
Elmore Leonard (1925–2013) American novelist and screenwriter
Source: Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing
“No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)
Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
“For all the invisible girls and for my readers, for seeing me”
Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer
Source: Saint Anything
Robert Frost book Collected Poems of Robert Frost
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Variant: The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
Source: Collected Poems of Robert Frost
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer
Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“When a long book succeeds, the writer and reader are not just having an affair; they are married.”
Stephen King book The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
Source: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet
Letter to John Taylor (February 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)
Context: In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance — Its touches of Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight — but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator
At an interview with Stephen Colbert at Montclair Kimberley Academy on January 29th, 2010.
2010s
Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist
Source: Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
“Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it”
Nella Larsen (1891–1964) Novelist, librarian, nurse
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet
"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
“Very deep. You should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you.”
Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy
Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.”
Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) English writer and sociologist
Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator
Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
