Reader Perspective Quotes

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

When I'm writing, I don't really have much other guide than, 'As a reader, how would I respond to this?'

There are two tests that we [writers] have for all of our writing: So What? and Who Cares? There is an answer to both. The answer to Who Cares is that a reader cares, if the writing is good. The answer to So What is that these ideas give us completely new understanding, change our sense of who we [people] are and why we're here [on this planet].

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

You can't be real," Delilah murmurs. "Says who?" I ask. "Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?

For me, as a writer, I desperately want to be read. I'm very conscious of readers as I'm writing. I think, 'If you write for yourself, then why don't you just keep it under the bed,' so I definitely write for other people.

As a reader and as a viewer, usually when I watch a movie, I'm caught up enough in the movie that I'm not breaking it down to the details anyway.

It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.

For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn’t written for poets, it’s written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it’s true for oneself.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

Every time I read anything, whether it be a book, a script, or anything, I automatically imagine myself as the boy in the plot. I don't know why. Seriously, anything. If I'm reading a magazine article or whatever, I picture myself as the kid people are talking about. It's really weird. I don't know why I do that.

....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

I can't control what a reader takes from a story.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

I think of myself as the eyes and ears and voice of the reader.

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.