“Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).” KnowsSeemsReadingDoorsAirReaderTwentiesResponseOpeningSensationsRebelFlashAttackingBlindedHordeSwarmsReading PoetryNo Response Book:The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929 - 1932 Source: The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929 - 1932
“in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.” PeopleLittlesBookDifferentStoriesReadingChanceReaderLuckySixPagesOrdinaryLonelyMarkTwentiesAccomplishBoredDifferent PeoplesBook ReadingDifferent PlaceAlphabetOrdinary LifeReading Stories Author:Natalie Babbitt
“here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers.” PeopleFirstsBelieveBookEarthThreeReadingI BelieveFictionWrittenCenturyReaderResourcesFirst TimeRainTwentiesFolksForestsLayersBook ReadingFiction WritersOzoneOzone LayerWritten History Book:A Year in Van Nuys Source: A Year in Van Nuys
“Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move andwe live on in peace. This is how it is concerning Time in our lives. And to render its passing perceptible, novelists must... have their readers cross ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.” KnowsWorldYearsDoeTwoFactsSeemsEarthMovingTimeTurnsReadingWalksOur LivesMinutesReaderTenCrossesTwentiesPassingPassingsNovelistsThirtyThirty Years Author:Marcel Proust
“More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross; but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective, that is all that writing is about.” PeopleWayWritingYearsMeanCreativePerspectiveReaderYears AgoTwentiesAccessNurtureReadershipDross Author:John Hodgman
“If you had told me twenty years ago that I would write a novel set in Russia, much less two, I simply wouldn't have believed you. I had no familiarity with Russia or its history, but part of what drives me as a reader, and more and more as a writer, is curiosity, the desire to explore unfamiliar terrain and inhabit alternate lives.” IfsWritingYearsTwoDesireNovelReaderYears AgoTwentiesCuriosityRussiaFamiliarityUnfamiliarTerrain Author:Debra Dean
“Because I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe point in more than one direction, and that seems important to me because it seems important to me that after you've invested twenty or thirty hours of your imaginative life into this narrative that you have some stake in how it ends.” ThinkingImportantEndsSeemsHoursNovelReaderTwentiesNarrativeThirtyEnterpriseStakesImaginativeOne Direction Author:Emily Barton
“I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.” ThinkingWayFirstsKindLanguageReaderTwentiesFormal Author:Junot Diaz