Reader's Imagination Quotes

My books are inert as cordwood till a reader's imagination ignites one and an old flame jumps to life.

In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.

I've done 33 Sherlock Holmes stories and bits of them are all right. But the definitive Sherlock Holmes is really in everyone's head. No actor can fit into that category because every reader has his own ideal.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator.

Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

The general ideas which are expressed in sketches, correspond very well to the art often used in poetry... every reader making out the detail according to his own particular imagination... but a painter, when he represents Eve on canvas, is obliged to give a determined form, and his own idea of beauty distinctly expressed.

The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriate effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead, but lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader's eyes, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him, but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry.

I feel that I am doing the minimum amount of damage to other possibilities that may take place in a reader's head.