If you’re a voracious reader and you write something that you want to read, odds are other people will want to read it, too.
– Tim Maleeny
Tag: reader
Quotable 483
The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
– William Zinsser
Quotable 466
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
– Stephen King
Quotable 462
If the reader doesn’t understand what you’re saying, you’re talking to yourself.
– Nigel Hamilton
Quotable 448
It’s amazing how much you can get away with that could be considered polemic as long as it’s funny. As soon as it ceases to be funny, your readers start feeling preached to and rebel.
– Lionel Shriver
Quotable 424
First-rate fiction lays hands on the reader, to heal him or rough him up or, ideally, to do both.
– Ellen Currie
Quotable 415
If you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading.
– Henry Green
Quotable 395
The purpose of fiction is to affect rather than to convince the reader. Its object is to reach him through his senses rather than through his mind. The purpose of argumentation is to convince; the purpose of description is to present a picture; the purpose of exposition is to impart knowledge, ideas, facts: but the characteristic purpose of narrative in the fictional sense in which we are taking it here is to make the reader feel.
– Thomas H. Uzzell
Quotable 311
I write as a reader, not knowing what the author will say next.
– Russell Edson
Quotable 279
I work on the assumption, or the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
– Clive James