I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.
In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
It’s the whole cat and mouse game between the readers and writers that makes the web work.
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
I was not a big comic-book reader.
Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.
I mean, my dad's a television producer, and I knew I could get a job as an assistant or a reader with one of his friends, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do.
My ideal reader is somebody who reads my poems out loud.
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
I'm an avid reader, and though it doesn't always work out in terms of relaxation, I've got to keep myself up to date with current affairs. I was a journalism student in college, and I don't feel like I can relax unless I feel informed. When people say they can't watch the news because it's too stressful, I just think, ignorance isn't bliss. It's just another way to procrastinate.
I love computers. I love writing on them. I love gadgetry. The thing is: I am a slow reader. So, if I am going to get my work done, I read, like, a newspaper and that's it. If I got into websites and the internet, I wouldn't get any work done.
I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaking to an audience. I'm not writing for the podium. I'm just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I'm trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
Original work has no floor and no ceiling. You can reach essentially zero readers or millions.
I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books. . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.
Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.
The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.