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Reader Quotes

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Reader Quotes

“We must be forewarned that only rarely does a text easily lend itself to the reader's curiosity... the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between the reader and writer. It is a composition between the reader and the writer in which the reader "rewrites" the text making a determined effort not to betray the author's spirit.”

Doe Spirit Reading Effort Learning Reader Curiosity Determined Encounters Betray Composition Transactions Forewarned

Author:Paulo Freire

“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

“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

“A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.”

Thinking Should Novel Reader Encounters

Author:Mohsin Hamid

“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

“In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.”

Source: Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.”

Writing Hate Reader My Family I Hate Meetings Encounters Exhilarating

Author:Aleksandar Hemon

“I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.”

Source: The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“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.”