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Reader Quotes

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Reader Quotes

“But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It’s a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form. Most of us will have to find our readers one by one, in other words, and against considerable resistance. If anything qualifies us as heroic, it’s that private perpetual struggle. Put down the magazine, soldier. Forget about the other guy. Remember who you are.”

“Believe me, I love commerce as much as the rest of the readers of 'Businessweek.' But in art, you have to be true to yourself and your musical vision. People have known me well for a long time, so if I was chasing a trend and doing something that wasn't authentic to who I am, they would know it in just a few seconds.”

“The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully written work of sophisticated connoisseurship that analyzes art in its own terms rather than imposing strident, politicized categories on it. It outlines the major body types, male and female, in Western art and, via a wealth of illustrations, trains the reader's eye to detect and evaluate proportion. This book reveres art”

“We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.”

Mind Heart Art Missing Reader Beats Discovery Mark Unity Variety Instant Theorems

Book:Science and Human Values

Source: Science and Human Values

“The general ideas which are expressed in sketches, correspond very well to the art often used in poetry... every reader making out the detail according to his own particular imagination... but a painter, when he represents Eve on canvas, is obliged to give a determined form, and his own idea of beauty distinctly expressed.”

Giving Wells Art Ideas Form Used Imagination Particular Reader Details Determined Painter Canvas Obliged

Book:The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Containing His Discourses, Idlers, A Journey to Flanders and Holland, and His Commentary on Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting; to which is Prefixed an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author by Edward Malone

Source: The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Containing His Discourses, Idlers, A Journey to Flanders and Holland, and His Commentary on Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting; to which is Prefixed an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author by Edward Malone

“When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected.”

Writing May Art Pay Attention Subjects Reader Scientist Proof Pay Attention Something New Rejected Discomfort

Author:Walter Darby Bannard

“I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.”

World Want Writing Mind Wells May Art Book Able Artist Pleasure Attention Study Pieces Products Reader Succeed Structure Admire Dividing

Author:Annie Dillard

“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

“Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.”

Knows Mean Art Real Sometimes Reader Angry

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin

“It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.”

Way Humans Wells Art Term Awareness Possibility Poet Reader Majors Significant Novelists Really Great

Author:F. R. Leavis

“The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.”

Writing Mind Art Feelings Seems Order Imagine Fine Reader Symbols Phrases Thoughts And Feelings Art Of Writing

Book:The Principles of Success in Literature

Source: The Principles of Success in Literature

“Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.”

Mind Art Book Desire Reader Museums

Book:Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Den tist

Source: Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Den tist

“There is (gentle reader) nothing (the works of God only set apart) which so much beautifies and adorns the soul and mind of man as does knowledge of the good arts and sciences . Many arts there are which beautify the mind of man; but of all none do more garnish and beautify it than those arts which are called mathematical , unto the knowledge of which no man can attain, without perfect knowledge and instruction of the principles, grounds, and Elements of Geometry.”

Men Mind Doe Art Soul Perfect Principles Reader Elements Mathematical Gentle Instruction Geometry Art And Science Good Art

Author:John Dee

“coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes.”

Source: Boojums All the Way Through: Communicating Science in a Prosaic Age

“There are three classes of readers; some enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy, and enjoy while they judge. The latter class reproduces the work of art on which it is engaged. Its numbers are very small.”

Art Three Reading Enjoy Numbers Class Judging Reader Judgment Engaged Enjoyment Latter Works Of Art

Book:Goethe's Opinions on the World, Mankind, Literature, Science, and Art

Source: Goethe's Opinions on the World, Mankind, Literature, Science, and Art

“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

“the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.”

Art Facts Form Fiction Class Reader Activism Impressed Persuasion Essays Sermons

Author:Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Art forms render ideas accessible to readers who could not receive those insights in any other format.”

Art Ideas Form Reader Insight Format

Author:Sara Maitland

“A piece of art - this goes for a painting or a sculpture or a book or whatever - really shouldn't have to do with the set of expectations that the viewer or the audience or the reader brings to that work. It should just have to do with how they interpret it and whether they like it or not.”

Should Art Book Audience Pieces Painting Reader Expectations Working It Viewers Sculpture

Author:Max Kellerman

“The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.”

Mean Art Emotion Alive Reader Intellect Division Public Life Love Poems Swimmer

Author:Jesse Lee Kercheval

“The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.”

Art Stories Hands Answers Novel Effects Reader Shapes Longing Patterns Wit Dramatic Significance Paradox Short Story Primitive Craving

Author:V. S. Pritchett

“Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe... Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them. Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader. Maybe we think we are supposed to like tough books, but are we? Who says? Many writers (and art museums) produce for quite a small subsample of the... public.”

“Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.”

Thinking Art Poetry Pleasure Reader Convinced Sensations Ingredients Passages Inability Deceived Admiring

Book:Delphi Complete Works of A. E. Housman (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Works of A. E. Housman (Illustrated)

“So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find exceptionally suggestive, apposite, or musical - are usually adjudged to be 'poetic'. ... The work of the poet is to contribute a text that will firstly invite such a reading; and secondly reward such a reading.”

Art Poetry Reading Poet Reader Investment Rewards Musical Poetic Invites

Author:Don Paterson

“Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.”

Source: The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History

“I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.”

Way Believe Art Asks Language I Believe Difficult Challenges Answers Serious Reader Argument Metaphor Works Of Art Essays Difficult Questions

Author:George Steiner

“[Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong.”

Ifs Thinking Knows Art Real Lasts Pleasure Modern Havens Honesty Example Ignorance Painting Theory Reader Blame Response Surface Genuine Comic Comic Strips Harshness Real Truth

Author:Chris Ware

“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.”

“Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.”

“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.”

Giving Art Important Individual Community Groups Reader Mass Importance Damn Works Of Art Don't Give A Damn I Don't Give A Damn

Author:Vladimir Nabokov

“Intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don't want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they're emotional or spiritual. I'm trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them.”

“The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850.”

Art Reading Fiction Reader Pages Constant Seduction

Author:Marge Piercy

“Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade.”

Way Feels Art Sometimes Enough Use Difficult Reader Evidence Trade Lays Bones Tricks Latter Explaining Marrow Dispassionate

Book:The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design

Source: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design

“If I'm doing my job correctly, I'm presenting a scenario for you as the reader to engage with on your own. I mean that's what the best art is supposed to do.”

Ifs Mean Art Jobs Reader Art Is Scenarios Presenting Best Art

Author:T.C. Boyle

“But I am not sure it would contain any short stories. For the short story is a minor art, and it must content itself with moving, exciting and amusing the reader. ...I do not think that there is any (short story) that will give the reader that thrill, that rapture, that fruitful energy which great art can produce.”

Thinking Giving Art Stories Moving Energy Produce Reader Exciting Not Sure Short Story Minors Thrill Great Art Amusing Rapture

Author:W. Somerset Maugham

“The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.”

“It's surprising that readers don't see challenging writing as morally hazardous, when it might be pushing the same kinds of boundaries as art does.”

Writing Kind Doe Art Might Challenges Reader Boundaries Pushing Surprising

Author:Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

“Ayn Rand held that art is a 're-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements.' By its nature, therefore, a novel (like a statue or a symphony) does not require or tolerate an explanatory preface; it is a self-contained universe, aloof from commentary, beckoning the reader to enter, perceive, respond.”

Doe Art Self Reality Artist Values Universe Novel Creation Reader Art Is Perceive Judgement Tolerate Metaphysical Statues Symphony Commentary Aloof Self Contained Beckoning

Author:Leonard Peikoff

“Whether this will prove a blessing or a curse, will depend upon the use our people will make of the blessings which a gracious God hath bestowed on us. If they are wise, they will be great and happy. If they are of a contrary character, they will be miserable. Righteousness alone can exalt them as a nation. Reader! Whoever thou art, remember this: and in thy sphere practice virtue thyself, an encourage it in others.”

People Ifs Art Character Use Remember Nations Practice Virtue Wise Depends Reader Blessing Prove Contrary Miserable Curse Righteousness Spheres Thyself Gracious

Author:Patrick Henry

“[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.”

Knows Has Beens Art Feelings Action Communication Reader Recognition Shock Listeners Viewers

Author:Walker Percy

“I think in space or music or art or literature of any kind there has to be some kind of void where the viewer or the spectator or the listener or the reader can insert themselves into it, and there is a certain kind of architectural space which is totalitarian, which does not allow you to do that.”

Thinking Kind Doe Art Certain Literature Space Reader Void Listeners Viewers Spectators Insert

Author:Jonathan Meades

“I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.”

Thinking Mind Art Reader Essays Utilitarian

Author:John D'Agata

“I can tell that I shaped the book very deliberately, after a great deal of thought, and that I insisted this piece function as a prologue, but I find the word "intention," confusing ("trust the art," as D.H. Lawrence said, "not the artist"). These speculations are perhaps better responded to by text and reader, rather than author.”

Art Said I Can Book Artist Deals Pieces Reader Function Intention Confusing Speculation Prologue

Author:Laura Mullen

“I like art that trusts its audience, that's written for readers who like to work hard. I like art that knows its readers are up to the challenge of interacting with difficult material.”

Knows Art Hard Difficult Challenges Audience Written Materials Hard Work Reader Interacting

Author:Joshua Mohr

“I was really inspired by seeing self published zines and mini-comics: seeing someone else make work that was either really personal, or was just done entirely themselves. It really showed me what was possible for my own art, and I hope that my books will inspire readers in the same way.”

Way Art Book Self Done My Own Seeing Inspire Reader Inspired Zines

Author:Liz Prince

“The process of creating art allows me to learn about the subject I'm illustrating. So, if I want to learn more about plantation life and slavery, I try to find clients that will give me an opportunity to work on projects that will visualize those experiences of the enslaved African and people of color. I get to learn about my roots, and my artwork allows the reader into that world by creating images that are accessible.”

People Ifs World Want Giving Trying Art Opportunity Process Subjects Color Reader Projects Creating Roots Give Me Slavery Clients Artwork Plantations Creating Art Illustrating

Author:Jerry Pinkney

“There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.”

Ifs Knows Should May Art Sometimes Character Seems Reader Works Of Art Passages

Author:Joyce Carol Oates

“For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.”

Firsts Littles Art I Can Would Be Three Games Bits Reader Pages Ears Intelligent Assuming Definitions Dropping Hints

Author:George Saunders