I really care about my readers. I care about anyone who reads my books.
My feeling of the whole genre, of the terror tale, is this: The best thing that you can do for the readers in this field is to terrify them. It is something that is intellectual, it happens in your mind.
I find I think of myself not as a writer so much as someone who provides a gateway, a tangential route for readers to reach the circus. To visit the circus again, if only in their minds, when they are unable to attend it physically. I relay it through printed words on crumpled newsprint, words that they can read again and again, returning to the circus whenever they wish, regardless of time of day or physical location. Transporting them at will. When put that way, it sounds rather like magic, doesn't it? p. 369
Don't market yourself. Editors and readers don't know what they want until they see it. Scratch what itches. Write what you need to write, feed the hunger for meaning in your life. Play at the serious questions of life and death.
A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.
To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.
I believe my readers are crazy about their parents and want to be just like them when they grow up
My "mission", if you can call it that, is to connect with my readers on an emotional level and have them come away with a stronger impression of the basic message in the story I am illustrating.
What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.
As a writer, you paint strokes and leave suggestions so readers can create their own pictures. That allows you to know someone by a small action and it saves countless pages of explanation.
That [photographs] disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that's why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.
Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.
A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.
All readers are good readers, when they have the right book.
Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.
It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of readers.
There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.
As a publisher what you are trying to build is a long life for a book, to help it find its readers in many different ways, whether or not it made this list or got that review, etc. I'm sure some of that thinking has been useful to me as a writer as well.
'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.