reader

If words come alive on the page, the writer succeeds in connecting to 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.

Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!

To reread a book is to read a different book. The reader is different. The meaning is different.

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don__ have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it__ being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn__ have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing__aybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.

One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also quite as certainly not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author, perhaps he did not want to be understood by "anyone_. A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against "the others". It is there that all the more refined laws of style have their origin: they at the same time keep off, they create distance, they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have said,) while they open the ears of those who are acoustically related to them.

Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds...I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books...It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Reading a book is a silent conversation between two friends.

If you work hard all day and all night, something may come of it. You never know, it just might.

He could tell her that dogs used to look like cats and vice versa without a lick of proof and it would change the way she regarded the animals.

It is that kind of thinking that is the problem; that movies, video games and the Internet, devices that simply amuse the imagination are more interesting than what a library stocks.

You've got to have high expectations to achieve top results.

I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen but failed. That was the greatest failure of my life.

Fear doesn't gain respect. It just makes people do what you want to shut you up and get you away from them.

We go round and round trying to convince one another that our opinion makes more sense. And the only winner is time for making us look like fools by wasting it.

If someone knew equally as much about the ins and outs of your home, it would not be your home.

Don't dare try to be heroes.

It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination.