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Reader Quotes

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Reader Quotes

“People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people - a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand?”

Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“This book reminds me of James Gleick's Chaos. The ideas and stories in Loving and Hating Mathematics are timely, interesting, and sometimes even profound. The authors, writing for nonspecialists, take pains to explain technical ideas in nontechnical language, and the book should interest general readers as well as a large mathematical audience.”

Should Writing Wells Book Ideas Sometimes Stories Pain Hate Language Interest Interesting Audience Reader Mathematics Profound Chaos Mathematical Timely

Author:Steven G. Krantz

“I have a really good idea of who my readers are and always write with a sensitivity to my audience. I use the F word when necessary, but there are words I won't use, mainly because I don't like them. I don't write about body parts when I write about sex. It's not about the physiological, it's more important for teens to read about the emotional aspects. I do think there are times when self-censorship is important.”

Thinking Writing Important Ideas Self Use Body Sex Audience Emotional Reader Aspect Good Ideas Censorship Teens Sensitivity Physiological Self Censorship

Author:Ellen Hopkins

“The brand is lying about something, or at least misrepresenting it. When I read a bottle of shampoo or moisturizer or other beauty product, I always perceive a dark subtext. The words haunt me. It comes across as humorous to the reader/audience, but in fact the words really do make me a little bit queasy. Nothing is as easy or natural as consumer brands want us to think - no problem is as resolvable. Your hair will fall out, eventually. Yet we do have these brands, and we line our shelves with them. There's an inherent irony.”

“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

“We consume everything like potato chips. In this environment, I suspect the cartoonist's connection with readers is likely to be superficial and fleeting, unless he taps into some fervent special interest niche. And that audience, almost by definition, will be tiny.”

Interest Audience Environment Special Reader Connections Definitions Tiny Suspects Superficial Fleeting Chips Potatoes Niche Special Interests Cartoonist Fervent Potato Chips

Author:Bill Watterson

“The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.”

Ifs Men Writing Wells Feelings Problem Would Be Age Today Wish Natural Religious Audience Reader Novelists Encounters Sentimental Sentimentality Credible Insurmountable

Author:Flannery O'Connor

“The copywriter uses words as tools to persuade and motivate an audience. You persuade your readers that you have something valuable to offer; you motivate them to acquire it for themselves. This is the essence of effective copywriting.”

Use Audience Reader Offers Tools Essence Valuable Acquire Copywriting

Book:Words That Sell

Source: Words That Sell

“I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.”

Ifs Writing I Can Actors Acting Audience Imagine Reader

Author:Joan Didion

“There are four basic emotions - mad, sad, glad and scared. And if you touch those emotions then you can grab your audience, your reader.”

Ifs Emotion Audience Four Reader Mad Scared Glad

Author:Larry Winget

“I just want to write books or give talks which, if I were in the audience or I were the reader, I would appreciate.”

Ifs Want Giving Writing Book Audience Reader Appreciate

Author:Marianne Williamson

“I do think there's a relationship between a book and a reader that's more intimate, in many ways, than the relationship between an audience member and a play - just by the nature of it being an object that you can have in bed with you and that you can keep and page through.”

Thinking Way Book Play Audience Objects Reader Bed Members Pages Intimate

Author:Sarah Ruhl

“I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.”

“The digital world has allowed me a connection with my reader that I'd never had before. I didn't meet the people who read my material. The fan letters were mostly answered by professional people that'd done them for a living. And I didn't have any daily connection with their response to my work. I didn't have a relationship with my audience. And every artist should have it.”

People World Should Done Artist Audience Fans Materials Reader Letters Connections Should Have Response Digital Digital World

Author:Berkeley Breathed

“In a novel, language is your principal tool, you try to build pictures in the mind of the reader. When you write a screenplay, the language is just a transition, the final goal is a picture on the screen, it's the only thing the audience sees.”

Writing Trying Mind Language Goal Novel Audience Reader Tools Finals Screens Transition Principal Screenplays

Author:Philippe Claudel

“When I decided to make my version of Poe's stories, I wanted to respect the original material or to at least get closer to what his stories are really about. Most other adaptations I've seen sort of follow the story but they never satisfy me as an audience member or as a reader.”

Stories Wanted Audience Materials Reader Members Decided Originals Versions Adaptation

Author:Raul Garcia

“Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.”

Source: George Bernard Shaw: Collected Articles, Lectures, Essays and Letters: Thoughts and Studies from the Renowned Dramaturge and Author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Pygmalion, Arms and The Man, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion

“...in the theatre the stage keeps the audience aware of the fictional nature of the action. The reader poring over a magazine, on the other hand, identifies what he sees in the photographs as real.”

Real Hands Action Audience Stage Reader Photograph Theatre Magazines

Book:Photography & Society

Source: Photography & Society

“...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.”

“When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.”

Mind Lasts Audience Reader Standards Imaginary Typewriters Things On My Mind

Author:Don DeLillo

“I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaking to an audience. I'm not writing for the podium. I'm just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I'm trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.”

Should Writing Trying Persons Fall Speak Silence Audience Clear Reader Quiet Falling In Love Tone Utterance

Author:Billy Collins

“I'm more than a little suspicious of humor in poems, because I think it can at times be a way of getting a reaction out of a reader, or an audience, that is something closer to relief: i.e., thank god this isn't poetry, but stand-up comedy. Some poets are really funny, but more often poets are fourth rate stand up comics at best. But they benefit from the sheer relief of the audience.”

Thinking Way Littles Audience Comedy Poet Reader Benefits Rate Reactions Relief Thank God Fourth Sheer Suspicious Stand Up Comedy

Author:Matthew Zapruder

“I don't think we need a critic to negotiate with the audience. People say, "Who are you writing for?" I'm writing for myself but my audience is anybody who knows how to read. I think a story should engage anybody who knows how to read. And I hope that my stories do, maybe on a different level for more sophisticated readers than, say, a high school kid, but still a story has got to grab you. That's why we read it.”

People Thinking Knows Needs Should Writing Stills Different Stories Kids School Levels Audience Know How Reader High School Critics Sophisticated Different Levels

Author:T.C. Boyle

“Most writers are lazy intellectuals, and it's a goddamn shame because a writer with an audience has a moral responsibility to make readers think about the world in a different way than what they're used to. Why else would you pick up a book if not to inhabit another realm of existence for a while?”

Ifs Thinking World Way Book Different Used Existence Responsibility Moral Audience Reader Picks Shame Different Ways Realms Lazy Moral Responsibility

Author:Kevin Keck

“The minute you finish a piece of writing it doesn't belong to you, you don't write it any more, it belongs to you, the reader, the listener, the audience. So the less you know about whether or not this is me talking about my life or this is me talking about your life, I think the better. Then it can belong to you and it can live outside of the moment in which it was conceived.”

Thinking Knows Writing Moments Talking Audience Pieces Minutes Reader Listeners This Is Me

Author:Kate Tempest

“It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.”

Way Years Book Seems Used Term Audience Knowing Reader Ten Size Used To Be Relative

Author:Robert Hass

“Children's books have great potential to reveal new possibilities to readers, because the intended audience is at an age of genuine learning.”

Children Book Age Audience Possibility Reader Genuine Children's Books New Possibilities

Author:Vivek Shraya

“If you tell the reader it's funny, then the audience is like an audience at a stand-up comedy club and they expect you to be funny, and if you're not, they notice. Whereas if you read a regular op-ed about Israel or the family or medicine, you're not starting with the assumption that you're supposed to laugh.”

Ifs Audience Laughing Comedy Reader Medicine Starting Clubs Israel Assumption Stand Up Comedy Comedy Clubs

Author:Dave Barry

“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

“As a non-western artist, you have to ask yourself a question fairly early in your life: do I want to become a bridge maker, do I want my culture to be understood by the west? I have no intentions of doing such things. I'm fine being a little strange to a non-western audience. It doesn't bother me if my book doesn't change a generation of American readers.”

Ifs Want Littles Book Artist Culture Asks Audience Generations Strange Fine Reader Understood Intention West Western Bridges Bother Makers

Author:Sarnath Banerjee

“I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful, but I'm annoying, and a phony.”

Giving Funny Reading Voice Audience Stage Reader Give Me Loud Helpful Fraud Annoying Fright Phony Love Of Reading Stage Fright

Author:Anne Lamott

“In comics the reader is in complete control of the experience. They can read it at their own pace, and if there's a piece of dialogue that seems to echo something a few pages back, they can flip back and check it out, whereas the audience for a film is being dragged through the experience at the speed of 24 frames per second.”

Ifs Seems Film Audience Pieces Reader Pages Speed Checks Dialogue Pace Echoes Flip

Author:Alan Moore

“Whether it's viewers of the show or readers of my columns and books, I'm consistently impressed with their wit, humor and insight. That goes for about 95 percent of the audience. The other five percent are why the 'Delete' option and restraining orders were invented.”

Book Shows Order Audience Five Reader Percent Insight Wit Consistently Impressed Viewers Columns Restraining Restraining Orders

Author:Richard Roeper