Best literature & reader Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.”

Writing Film Certain Literature My Own Cases Reader Difficulty Limitation Viewers Concentrating

Author:Manuel Puig

“Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.”

Thinking Writing Literature Reader Always Thinking

Author:Manuel Puig

“Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.”

Turns Literature Understanding Information Reader Benefits Tasks Method Appreciation Helpful

Book:The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

Source: The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.”

Ifs Way Doe Important Character Literature Moral Reader Truth Is Universal Addresses

Author:Whitley Strieber

“When you're kept by a patron you don't have to duke it out in the media marketplace for dollars and for readers. In some ways that's a blessing because it takes a lot of pressure off you.”

Way Literature Media Reader Blessing Pressure Dollars Marketplace Dukes Patron

Author:David Talbot

“It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.”

Inspirational Mean Art Ends Moving Artist Literature Speak Goal Roles Mankind Reader Tasks Ridiculous Irony Pathetic Specialists Carried Away Pathos

Author:Yevgeny Zamyatin

“I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.”

People Ifs Should Years Book Would Be Fighting Literature Wonderful Reader Shots Critics Spots Department Reviews Say Anything Bans Insufferable Book Review

Author:Philip Roth

“Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.”

Happens Reading Literature Process Practice Reader Bookshelves

Author:Terry Eagleton

“Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.”

Humans Literature Moral Duty Reader Activity Mass Concern Remains Critics Engaged Ethical Indispensable Human Activity Volition Busybodies

Author:Gao Xingjian

“In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?”

Ifs Age Life Is Purpose Literature Enjoy Voice Reader Delight Standardization

Author:Dana Gioia

“As far as I know, Clifford Pickover is the first mathematician to write a book about areas where math and theology overlap. Are there mathematical proofs of God? Who are the great mathematicians who believed in a deity? Does numerology lead anywhere when applied to sacred literature? Pickover covers these and many other off-trail topics with his usual verve, humor, and clarity. And along the way the reader will learn a great deal of serious mathematics.”

“Truth, like beauty, varies its fashions, and is best recommended by different dresses to different minds; and he that recalls the attention of mankind to any part of learning which time has left behind it, may be truly said to advance the literatures of his own age. As the manners of nations vary, new topicks of persuasion become necessary, and new combinations of imagery are produced; and he that can accommodate himself to the reigning taste, may always have readers who perhaps would not have looked upon better performances.”

Source: The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752

“Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs of the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book.”

Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With An Essay on His Life and Genius

“There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.”

I Can Wanted Literature Reader France Harvard Neurologists

Author:Jim Harrison

“On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there.”

Helping Literature Stuff Huge Reader Bases Gray

Author:Jim Lehrer

“If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations.”

Ifs Writing Literature Knowing Reader Expectations Categories Framework

Author:Nora Roberts

“A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.”

Way Mean Children Stories Literature Loses Imagination Alive Growing Reader Unique Dancing Tales Encounters Listeners Good Story Lively Arrivals Spirited Children's Literature

Author:Katherine Paterson

“I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.”

Humans War Reality Young Suffering Literature Loss Race Reader Destruction Plant Hunger Seeds Neglect Harsh Stubborn Famine Children's Literature Harsh Reality

Book:Read for Your Life #21

Source: Read for Your Life #21

“The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants.”

Source: The collected stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

“But if there is such a thing as social commitment in literature, I think it must manifest itself in a reader's awareness of the human condition, in the writer's touching some common nerve ending. I think this kind of social commitment, like a lady's slip, should be there but it must not show.”

Ifs Thinking Should Humans Kind Shows Literature Social Common Conditions Awareness Reader Commitment Nerves Manifest Touching Slips Human Condition

Author:Bel Kaufman

“Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond.”

Film Literature Interesting Century Example Reader Truth Is Evolve Genre Accomplished 20th Century Castles Gothic Most Interesting Gloomy Sinister Stoker

Author:Carlos Ruiz Zafon

“Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.”

May Facts Desire Literature Term Communication Reader Tasks Fundamentals Impression Rebellion Nevertheless Obscure

Author:Georges Bataille

“Imagine! It is the real power of a book--not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.”

Book Real Happens Literature Imagine Reader Pages Definitions Real Power

Book:The Last Bookaneer: A Novel

Source: The Last Bookaneer: A Novel

“I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.”

Way Children Book Bigs Father Literature Crime Reader Becoming Lovers Annoying Librarian Great Book Nancy Book Lover Nancy Drew

Author:Asa Larsson

“Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.”

Writing Kind Different Past Used Poetry Literature Fiction Teach Reader Critical Theoretical Writing Fiction

Author:Nicholas Royle

“Poetry and code - and mathematics - make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations.”

Writing Kind Moving Form Poetry Three Literature Written Reader Transformation Mathematics Silent Patterns Active Code Domain Static Interactive Qualitative Topology

Author:Stephanie Strickland

“This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give to the reader; and in doing so they turn language against its own project of conceptual division, and use it to heal itself - and in the process - paradoxically - to articulate new concepts that it can't yet accommodate.”

Giving Use Poetry Turns Reading Literature Language Process Practice Poet Reader Projects Concepts Capacity Heal Division Accommodate Heal Itself

Author:Don Paterson

“The 'open text' often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers.”

Poetry Literature Process Reader Originals Composition Foreground

Book:The Language of Inquiry

Source: The Language of Inquiry

“I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.”

People Knows Believe Book Values Reading Literature Lost Fiction Particular Reader Habit Entertainment Enjoyed Sentimental Frivolous Sentimental Value

Author:David Nicholls

“Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.”

Source: Rotunda: a selection from the works of Aldous Huxley

“Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everythingin every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.”

Way Want Needs Littles Reason Remember Literature Voice Rooms Talking Reader Citizens Please Absolutes Sacred Privileged Arena Secrecy Unimportant Absolute Freedom Goodman

Author:Salman Rushdie

“Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.”

Writing Whole Literature Novel Reader Scene Phrases Cherish Awkward Spoiled Lumps American Literature Bad Writing Sodium

Book:A book of prefaces

Source: A book of prefaces

“Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.”

“The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriate effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead, but lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader's eyes, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him, but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry.”

Want Doe Eye Literature Imagine Effects Particular Reader Shapes Machines Appropriate Constructs Solemn Calculations Lively Inventing Advancing Synthetic

Author:Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

“a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.”

People Book Literature Poet Reader Sells Critics Publishers Monument Biographers Rubble

Book:Trust

Source: Trust

“We with my husband [Joseph Millar] are often the first reader for one another's work, and we often also have the last word. We trust each other. We have our past working life in common, our recombined families, as well as our life as teachers, and we read much of the same literature and have similar esthetics, so there's a simpatico there. But we do disagree and that can be fruitful, even if it's not so great in the moment.”

Ifs Firsts Wells Moments Lasts Past Literature Common Teacher Our Lives Reader Husband My Husband Disagree Our Past Last Words Working Life Simpatico

Author:Dorianne Laux

“True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level.”

World Stories Literature Levels Moral Emotional Reader Essence Philosophical

Author:Orhan Pamuk

“It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics.”

People Want Problem Culture Literature Emotion Reader Concern Universal Intention Turkeys Turkish

Author:Orhan Pamuk

“I hate to see great works of literature ghettoized, whereas others that conform to the rules, conventions, and procedures of the genre we call literary fiction get accorded greater esteem and privilege. I also have a problem with how books are marketed, with certain cover designs and typefaces. They're often stamped with an identity that has nothing to do with their effect on the reader.”

Book Problem Certain Hate Literature Fiction Greater Effects Design Identity Reader I Hate Privilege Esteem Genre Conventions Conform Great Work Procedures Typefaces

Author:Michael Chabon

“I am not against standardized tests. There are tests and tests and tests, and, to simplify, the ones I favor are criterion-referenced tests of skills, aligned with the curriculum. Social and emotional skills are important but skills are too. I find it heartbreaking that this is so often seen as an either-or choice. To get to the richness of studying literature, for example, you must first be an adept and confident reader. Whether you are is something a good test can measure.”

Firsts Important Choices Literature Social Study Example Emotional Reader Skills Tests Favors Criteria Richness Simplify Heartbreaking Curriculum Adept Either Or Studying Literature

Author:Nicholas Lemann

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