Reader Quotes (page 14)
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Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
But the operation of writing implies that of reading as its dialectical correlative and these two connected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the joint effort of author and reader, which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others.
Jean-Paul Sartre
When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book's plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body of flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the...
Don DeLillo
In TIME June 7, 2010On the sustainability of the publishing industry, in the Chicago Tribune:"I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers.... The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175." - 5/26/10
Garrison Keillor
She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she...
Louise Erdrich
What leads me to accredit the truth of what great Savonati has conveyed to us is the way in which he conscientiously tells us everything. In novels written nowadays, writers pay little heed to their heroes' stomachs. They send them off on errands, embroil them in adventures which leave them as breathless as the reader, and yet they are never hungry. In this respect, they bear little resemblance to the author. In my opinion, this, more than anything else, serves to discredit this type of work....
Honore de Balzac
