Reader Perception Quotes

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.

What reporters may increasingly see as a necessity, readers see as a scourge.

I often don't read reviews.

We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

Not to any really influential effect, but certainly there have been comments that have surprised me. It's surprising sometimes to get particular perspectives on your work, and it's enlightening sometimes to know that non-writers and readers out there have certain assumptions about everything that I both want to keep in mind and want to forget about why I write, and about the connection between me as a private person and the stuff that I think about on the page.

Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

Unfortunately, a lot of fantasy is chock full of sexism and racism. A lot of authors don't even realize they're doing it, and a lot of readers don't know they're reading it. That's what makes it so scary in some cases.

Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

I can't control what a reader takes from a story.

I think that setting a novel in a small town taps into a sense of nostalgia among readers. People tend to believe life is different in small towns, and frankly, it is different.

I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make sense: 'Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.'

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.