Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don't. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers.
‐‐ Julia Glass
Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.
‐‐ Sara Zarr
Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.
‐‐ Fiona McIntosh
Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.
‐‐ Nancy Kress
Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an 'Airedale,' not just a 'dog.' A taste should not be merely 'good' but 'creamy and sweet' or 'sharply salty' or 'buttery on the tongue.'
‐‐ Nancy Kress
Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.
‐‐ Lynn Coady
Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
‐‐ Dean Koontz
Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.
‐‐ Susan Vreeland
Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world.
‐‐ Ryszard Kapuscinski
Reading a book about management isn't going to make you a good manager any more than a book about guitar will make you a good guitarist, but it can get you thinking about the most important concepts.
‐‐ Drew Houston
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.
‐‐ Angela Carter
Reading a book, watching a movie, going to a play, it's transporting, and very, very exciting. And to be a part of that, creating things with your imagination, whoa.
‐‐ Steve Carell
Reading a book you are not enjoying is a torture not to be undertaken without a reward. I leave plays at the interval, too!
‐‐ Mariella Frostrup
Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process.
‐‐ LeVar Burton
Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky.
‐‐ Kate Christensen
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
‐‐ A. S. Byatt
Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.
‐‐ Thomas Perry
Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.
‐‐ Sydney Pollack
Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.
‐‐ Macklemore
Reading a play, you view yourself as part of a whole. You see where the whole thing is going, and so you're willing to go to the very ugly place that your heart may go in order to serve the whole.
‐‐ Annie Parisse
Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.
‐‐ Douglas Dunn
Reading a script is usually as exciting as reading a boilerplate legal document, so when you read one that makes you feel as if you're seeing the movie, you know it's something different.
‐‐ Tom Hanks
Reading about myself on 'Perez Hilton' was kind of the weirdest thing ever.
‐‐ Melissa Benoist
Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.
‐‐ George Washington Carver
Reading about Queen Victoria has been a passion of mine since, as a child, I came across Laurence Housman's play 'Happy and Glorious,' with its Ernest Shepard illustrations.
‐‐ A. N. Wilson
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
‐‐ Albert Einstein
Reading allows me to recharge my batteries.
‐‐ Rahul Dravid
Reading an audio book is a very odd experience because there are three people sitting out there while you're reading in this glass booth, and you can see their reactions.
‐‐ Ruth Reichl
Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.
‐‐ Daniel Tammet
Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.
‐‐ Julian Barnes
Reading and understanding the Bible involves lots and lots of interpretation. Not just in light of the world and culture around us, but in reference to other parts of the Bible.
‐‐ John Piper
Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
‐‐ Margaret Atwood
Reading and writing is so important, and it's something I am really keen to promote. It's something that can be a bit lost these days with so much else going on.
‐‐ Frank Lampard
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
‐‐ Margaret Atwood
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
‐‐ Katherine Paterson
Reading 'Blood Will Out,' one begins to understand how so many people were duped by Clark Rockefeller. All the imposter needs is some kind of initial agreement that he is who he says he is; thereafter, consensus builds via a network of human relationships.
‐‐ Amity Gaige
Reading books might itself be a bit weird, but obviously okay, since books were part of school, and doing well in school was clearly a good thing. But comics were more like candy, just flashy wrappers without any nourishment. Cheap thrills.
‐‐ Michael Dirda
Reading builds the educated and informed electorate so vital to our democracy.
‐‐ Brad Henry
Reading can be just feeding, but smart reading takes us further. The classroom is one way to go deeper, but we can't stay in school forever.
‐‐ Bobbie Ann Mason
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
‐‐ Arthur C. Clarke
Reading cookbooks will help with just about anything in your life, including heartbreak.
‐‐ Isabel Gillies
Reading develops cognitive skills. It trains our minds to think critically and to question what you are told. This is why dictators censor or ban books. It's why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. It's why girls in developing countries have acid thrown in their faces when they walk to school.
‐‐ Karin Slaughter
Reading for me will be a combination of books, magazines, Tumblr and just kind of the Web in general on the iPad.
‐‐ David Karp
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
‐‐ John Locke
Reading great dialogue as an actor is such a rare privilege.
‐‐ Max Casella
Reading has always been the great love of my life.
‐‐ Darren Shan
Reading has been the fuel of my motivation: it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued.
‐‐ Zig Ziglar
Reading has made me more open, has improved my understanding, and has made me a better artiste, but it also makes me live in my own bubble. My mom keeps asking me, 'What do you read in that room the whole day?' Once I am into a book, I will finish it.
‐‐ Sonam Kapoor
Reading history, one rarely gets the feeling of the true nature of scientific development, in which the element of farce is as great as the element of triumph.
‐‐ David Gross
Reading in a sound booth seems very strange. Everyone has a process they are comfortable with; this was uncomfortable for me.
‐‐ Gore Verbinski