Best reader & ifs Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“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.”

“I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.”

Ifs Thinking Persons Whole Reading Differences Poet Personality Reader Sitting

Author:James Laughlin

“I do have to earn a living, so I'm conscious of probable reactions from readers, but the most important one is still the awareness that if I'm not enjoying a story, the reader won't either.”

Ifs Stills Important Stories Enjoy Awareness Reader Conscious Reactions

Author:Thomas Perry

“I'm not a masochistic reader. If something is just too dense or not enjoyable, even though I'm told it should be good for me, I'll put it down. That said, most of what I read would be considered high-end or good for you, I suppose. But, I also think that reading should be enjoyable.”

Ifs Thinking Should Said Ends Would Be Reading Reader Be Good Enjoyable Dense Masochistic

Author:Josh Radnor

“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.”

“I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.”

Ifs Writing Book Character Moving Purpose Behinds Reader Comfortable Pages Ultimate Smell Block Novelists Plot Outlines Phony Plausible Synopsis

Author:Clive Cussler

“Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Stills Self Bigs Remember Memories Wind Reader Findings Our Family Theme Vivid Incidents Our Memories Saga Self Contained

Book:Writing about Your Life: A Journey Into the Past

Source: Writing about Your Life: A Journey Into the Past

“A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.”

Ifs Party Novel Missing Reader Conversation Starters After Party

Author:Maggie Stiefvater

“I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.”

Ifs Feels I Can Real Matter Character Action Interesting Reader Kings Regard Meetings Queens Plot Compelled Twists Meeting Someone Plot Twists

Author:Maggie Stiefvater

“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

“If you want to be a leader, you've got to be a reader.”

Ifs Want Business Leader Reader

Author:David A. Noebel

“I think when you've had success, publishers and reviewers and readers are willing to let you try something new if you've already proven yourself. They're excited about what you're doing, you have people interested in it, and actually waiting for it. It's empowering.”

People Ifs Thinking Trying Waiting Willing Reader Excited Empowering Something New Proven Publishers Doing You Reviewers

Author:Lois Lowry

“What if most of the technologies readers and cinemagoers are presented with in bestselling books and blockbuster movies are not science fiction, but science fact? What if they currently exist on the planet, but are suppressed from the masses?”

Ifs Book Facts Fiction Technology Planets Reader Mass Science Fiction What If Blockbuster

Author:James Morcan

“The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.”

Ifs Firsts Long Would Be Past Night Acting Teach Novel Teacher Reader Satisfied Novelists Imperfection Behalf Savagery Long Nights

Book:Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism

Source: Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism

“I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.”

Ifs Thinking Want Book Moving Reader

Author:Katherine Paterson

“If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.”

Ifs Thinking Giving Writing Character Interesting Powerful Reader Vulnerability

Book:Stan Lee's Chakra The Invincible Free Comic Book Day Special 2015

Source: Stan Lee's Chakra The Invincible Free Comic Book Day Special 2015

“Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.”

Ifs Two Enough Age Three Class Produce Reader Critics Here And There Esoteric

Book:The Works of Thomas De Quincey,

Source: The Works of Thomas De Quincey,

“Should a writer single out and point his raillery at particular persons, or satirize the miserable, he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man if he could please himself.”

Ifs Men Should Persons Might Particular Reader Please Ill Miserable Satire

Author:Joseph Addison

“There are people already sharing eBooks out there, .. and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me.”

People Ifs Way Giving Book Character Hands Running Turns Hours Novel Cutting Figures Willing Return Reader Pages Lays Errors Posts Online Copies Promoting Printed Edits Spine Output Return To Me

Author:Cory Doctorow

“I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.”

Ifs Knows Want Writing Firsts Made Book Reading Wonderful Reader

Author:Neil Gaiman

“If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.”

Ifs Writing Fiction Reader Genre

Author:Yann Martel

“If you aren't on Goodreads, you should be. I've said it before, it's like Facebook for readers on crack.”

Ifs Should Said Reader Cracks Goodreads Like Facebook

Author:Colleen Hoover

“GraceQuest is a gripping story of one man's (and his family's) struggle with tremendous weakness and pain, but it is also a narrative theodicy--defense of God's goodness in spite of the undeniable reality of evil. . . . This is an honest and hard-hitting book about God's grace in and through tremendous loss of health and strength. Readers will find hope and help here if they are open to its message about the God-given 'strength to suffer well.'”

“I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Character Stories Attitude Reader Appeals Uncertainty What If Crap Uncertain Good Writers

Author:Charles de Lint

“My theory about writing is that one should write books you'd like to read, but no one else has written yet. So, as long as I stick with that, I'm entertaining myself, and then hopefully my readers as well. I hope to god I realize that I'm repeating myself, if I ever do. But if I don't, I'm sure my readers will let me know.”

Ifs Knows Should Writing Wells Long Book Realizing Written Theory Reader Let Me Sticks Hopefully Entertaining

Author:Charles de Lint

“If you find that the reader of popular romances--however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances--goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.”

Ifs Romance Reader Evidence Again And Again Uneducated

Book:On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

Source: On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.”

Source: Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut

“Your readers should be so compelled to read your copy that they cannot stop reading until they read all of it as if sliding down a slippery slide.”

Ifs Should Reading Reader Copies Compelled Slides Slippery

Book:The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America's Top Copywriters

Source: The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America's Top Copywriters

“If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work.”

Ifs Kind Book States Reading Reader Best Work

Author:Jeff VanderMeer

“Nature is my religion. And my desire...my ambition...the great goal I wish to achieve is to take my readers with me into the heart of this Nature. I love it, and I feel that they must love it......if I can only get the two acquainted.”

Ifs Feels Heart I Can Two Desire Wish Goal Achieve Reader Ambition My Ambition

Author:James Oliver Curwood

“I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me.”

Ifs Thinking Knows Way I Can Reading Known Too Much Focus Information Example Reader Personal Life Interchange Salinger Reading Experience

Author:Tom Robbins

“I think Miss Moore was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack" - the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, "Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it?" No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg.”

Ifs Thinking Feels May Long States Seems Left Too Much Cutting Missing Reader Please Legs Protest Long Ago Steeples Donatello

Author:Randall Jarrell

“There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.”

Ifs Sometimes Seems Might Attitude Doubt Position Poet Reader Good Things Fantastic Not Sure No Doubt Clay Remarks Fertile Muddle Auden

Author:Randall Jarrell

“Just think, reader, what will happen to you if the truth of a mad beast overpowers the sane truth of man?”

Ifs Thinking Men Happens Truth Reader Mad Beast Sane

Author:Maxim Gorky

“My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it.”

“It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact , out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.”

Ifs Knows Facts Feelings Eye Speak Talking Sea Reader Habit Pure Highest Wave Rage Checks Fixed His Eyes Etc Flood True Ones Remorseless

Book:The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings

Source: The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings

“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

“You asked 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.”

People Ifs World Way Want Mean Stills I Can Book Culture Reading Asks Answers Fiction Changed Return Reader Scandal

Book:Conversations with Philip Roth

Source: Conversations with Philip Roth

“The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention - incites a pleasurable compulsion to 'follow' - is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.”

Ifs Force Rooms Views Attention Wonder Environment Effects Reader Response Patterns Vices Point Of View Poetic Compelled Compulsion Incidents Continuity Binding Utterance Latent Insistence

Author:Laura Riding

“Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction.”

“Children make better readers than adults. They read as carefully as I write; adults read as a means of getting off to sleep. I get letters saying 'I have read your book seventeen times.' If you're an adult novelist and you get that letter, you should be afraid. You're being stalked. Kids always read them seventeen times!”

Ifs Should Writing Mean Children Book Kids Sleep Reader Adults Letters Novelists Seventeen

Author:Daniel Pinkwater

“There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.”

Ifs Should Writing Persons Self Enough Expression Reader Aim Seven Patient Self Expression

Book:The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature

Source: The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature

“If you discover a word in my book that you don't understand, ask your parents so they can look it up in the dictionary for you.”

Ifs Looks Book Age Reading Asks Parent Reader Treasure Tales Dictionary

Author:Gloria Estefan

“Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.”

Ifs Character Mines Reader Wit Nerves Gifted Aspire

Book:Essays of Elia

Source: Essays of Elia

“If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture.”

Ifs Whole Culture Natural Strange Reader Aspect Stress Details Reasonable Bizarre Arbitrary

Author:Gregory Bateson

“It's interesting when you're doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there.... My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they've been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it.”

People Ifs Knows Humans Looks Has Beens Reading Interesting Particular Type Reader Messages Tables Intense Staring Definite Gathering Session Signing Queues Symbiosis

Author:Martin Amis

“I would like to please the reader, and I think that surprise has to be an element of this, and that may necessitate a certain amount of teasing. To shock the reader is something else again. That has to be handled with great care if you're not going to alienate and hurt him, and I'm firmly against that, just as I disapprove of people who dress with that in mind - dye their hair blue and stick safety pins through their noses and so on.”

People Ifs Thinking Mind May Care Certain Hurt Hair Reader Amount Please Elements Dresses Safety Blue Sticks Surprise Noses Shock Pins Tease Safety Pins

Author:John Ashbery

“The reader can test his own psychology by asking himself whether he would consider, in retrospect, the selling at 156 in 1925 and buying back at 109 in 1931 was a satisfactory operation. Some may think that an intelligent investor should have been able to sell out much closer to the high of 381 and to buy back nearer the low of 41. If that is your own view you are probably a speculator at heart and will have trouble keeping to true investment precepts while the market rushes up and down.”

“Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue, or mosque you may belong! See if you do not find more true religion among the host of the excommunicated than among the far greater host who excommunicated them.”

Ifs May Church Greater Reader Visible Host Mosques True Religion Synagogue

Book:Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible

Source: Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible

“But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual's solipsism.”

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Reader Quotes