There are a few things that even sarcasm can't protect you from.
You must learn to read well, Marisa. As long as you're a good reader, you can learn anything, do anything.
...the chapters on whaling in MOBY DICK can be omitted by all but the most punishment-loving readers.
Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.
I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.
I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.
I'm not the best actor I can be, so I'm just working on it. I'm not the quickest reader in the world but when I get an acting book I can read it in two days.
The high domed ceiling put me in mind of a skull, a brain, a mind. What did that make us, the readers?
The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?
In , Anthony Barcellos mines rich family history to create a full-blooded tale that readers will find insightful, rewarding, and entertaining.
As a columnist, I realize that whatever amount of corruption I expose, half my readers will block it out, although they may get a frisson of joy in the process.
The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.
There were the people who read and there were the others. Whether you were a reader or a nonreader--it was quickly noted. There was no greater distinction between people.
Writers should cut as close to the vein as possible. The readers don't want to be covered in your warm sticky blood, but they want to come as close to it as possible.
For years, we in publishing have been hearing from Catholic readers that they really yearn for Catholic fiction.
What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.
A writer writes knowing that nothing else will elicit the same kind of satisfaction and personal triumph as molding the written word into a reader's great experience.
One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.
If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.
