Reader's Perspective Quotes

The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

When people say they write for themselves, that's probably what they do. I will admit that I don't write for myself; I write to be read. I've got the reader in my mind all the time.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.

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

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.

Literature is about telling stories. Now, the gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded. It may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Whether it is fun to go to bed with a good book depends a great deal on who's reading it.

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.

As a writer, you always read in two minds: You read as a reader and you enjoy it, and you look at it as a writer, and you just admire the architecture and the construction.

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.

Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

As a reader, I don't feel a story has an obligation to make me happy. I want stories to show me a bigger world than the one I know.

But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you.

The key to good worldbuilding is leaving out most of what you create. You, as the author, had damn well better know the where all that dragon food comes from, but that doesn't mean that I, as a reader, want to read a five thousand word essay about you explaining it to me. I don't need to see the math, but I can tell by the details you provide whether or not you've thought these things through to their logical conclusions.

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.