Reader Impact Quotes

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

I will say overwhelmingly what means so much more to me than the opinion of one reviewer are the letters I get from fans who tell me how a particular book has changed their life.

Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.

Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.

People don't understand how much influence they can actually have on a writer, how much a writer's feelings can be hurt, how much they can deflect his course when they raise their voices like they did over highly personal books like 'Panama' or 'Bullet Park.'

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

It's what the reader thinks that counts.

My greatest wish is that a certain way of looking at the world, a way I show in all of my books, gets into my readers' heads, and slowly alters their perception.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.

I don't write to give joy to readers but to give them a conscience.

I want to write a story for people where they finish it, and it sticks with them.

A good book is fruitful of other books; it perpetuates its fame from age to age, and makes eras in the lives of its readers.

Readers have actually changed the way I've done things, changed the course of my career even, about four or five times. Just from reader feedback.