Beta Reading Quotes

Now let's say you've finished your first draft. Congratulations! Good job! Have a glass of champagne, send out for pizza, do whatever it is you do when you've got something to celebrate. If you have someone who has been impatiently waiting to read your novel-a spouse, let's say, someone who has perhaps been working nine to five and helping to pay the bills while you chase your dream-then this is the time to give up the goods ... if, that is, your first reader or readers will promise not to talk to you about the book until you are ready to talk to them about it. ~ Stephen King

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books. ~ Tony Judt

Women with clean houses do not have finished books. ~ Joy Held

I was in the library reading - getting lost in another world that's not my reality. ~ Jay McLean

Bible daily reading:Awaken of my soul to purest of knowledge. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading. ~ Maria Montessori

Consciousness ain't slower than a blink of an eye. ~ Toba Beta

At last, the newspapers discovered the Bears. I kept writing articles about upcoming games, and by reading the papers, I learned editors like superlatives. I blush when I think how many times I wrote that the next game was going to be the most difficult of the season or how a new player was the fastest man in the West. ~ George Halas

Reading Tomato Red-the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon-was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself-of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift. ~ Megan Abbott

This is a fun action story and light reading. ~ Steve O'Driscoll

[A witch] might even – and this will make you jump – she might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look carefully at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling to you at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don't let that put you off. It could be part of her cleverness.

I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But -- and here comes the big "but" -- it is not impossible. ~ Roald Dahl

I remember reading scripts when I started in the business, and [Latino roles] were either nonexistent or written as the maid or a drug dealer. We're no longer just that. I'll play any part that challenges me. What's important is that all races have choices. ~ Eva Mendes

Every science fiction is a reading of the period that produced it. ~ Andrew Durbin

I'm a New Yorker. I'm liberal and open-minded. Things don't really shock me. But I was reading the second-act today and thinking that if you're religious, you could be. But you shouldn't be! You can be extremely religious and have your faith and still be open-minded to art. Because this is art. That's part of the excitement. It literally is "The Jerry Springer Show" on-stage set to beautiful operatic music. That's what's so incredible about it! ~ Max Von Essen

I lay there unable to move, reading about disasters in the far corners of the world. What could I do? Write letters, send checks. But there will never be a time when terrible trouble is not stalking the earth, and I began to see how important it is to appreciate what you have.

For too long I'd been waiting for the wonderful. But there is so much joy in everyday occurrences: a butterfly in the sun the first crisp bite of an apple, the rich aroma of roasting meat. Maybe I had to break my foot to open my eyes, but I finally understood why cooking means so much to me. In a world filled with no, it is my yes. ~ Ruth Reichl

I love reading and am always stuck in one labrinth of letters or other ~ Sarah Vowell

A super gigantic power of this universe
can be unleashed by a secret little trigger. ~ Toba Beta

I was given permission to serve myself Communion, with wine and a wafer, on the surface on the Moon. But I was advised not to say anything about it at the time. Someone had strongly objected to the Apollo 8 crew reading from the Bible. We didn't want to get into any further trouble with the religious critics. ~ Buzz Aldrin

If I could publish actual interviews with vampires - " "Sheesh, Susan. You're reading too much off the bestseller list. In ~ Jim Butcher

Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love. ~ Stephen Nachmanovitch

I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to light my way. ~ Jack Dee

I loved reading historical novels when I was young, but I definitely don't think I wrote one. When I read my book through, when it was completely done and in printed galleys, I was surprised by how uninterested in the passage of time and history the book seemed to be. Even though you can feel it all there, that's just not what it's focused on. ~ Danielle Dutton

...he has never read a single page of any of my books.
Once, when I told him I'd love to know what he thinks of them, he demurred.
"I couldn't possibly say," he said. "If you read a novel to the end, then it's over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I'd much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever. ~ Yoko Ogawa

I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly."

"It is amazingly; it may well suggest amazement if they do, for they read nearly as many as women. I myself have read hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas. If we proceed to particulars, and engage in the never-ceasing inquiry of 'Have you read this?' and 'Have you read that?' I shall soon leave you as far behind me as -- what shall I say? -- I want an appropriate simile, -- as far as your friend Emily herself left poor Valancourt when she went with her aunt into Italy. ~ Jane Austen

My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten, and I didn't live with him after that, though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer; I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special; he's still one of my favorite writers. ~ Andre Dubus III

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. ~ Bertrand Russell

Every man should believe in something.
If not..
he would doubt everything, even himself. ~ Toba Beta

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give. ~ T. S. Eliot

There's wall of agony between dreams and reality. ~ Toba Beta

As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves! ~ Jan Karon

I sit in my room like Miss Havisham, about whom I have been reading this week. Better the Dickens you know than the Dickens you don't know - on the whole I enjoyed it. But I should like to say something about this 'irrepressible vitality', this 'throwing a fresh handful of characters on the fire when it burns low', in fact the whole Dickens method - it strikes me as being less ebullient, creative, vital, than hectic, nervy, panic-stricken. If he were a person I should say 'You don't have to entertain me, you know. I'm quite happy just sitting here.' This jerking of your attention, with queer names, queer characters, aggressive rhythms, piling on adjectives - seems to me to betray basic insecurity in his relation with the reader. How serenely Trollope, for instance, compares. I say in all seriousness that, say what you like about Dickens as an entertainer, he cannot be considered as a real writer at all; not a real novelist. His is the garish gaslit melodramatic barn (writing that phrase makes me wonder if I'm right!) where the yokels gape: outside is the calm measureless world, where the characters of Eliot, Trollope, Austen, Hardy (most of them) and Lawrence (some of them) have their being. ~ Philip Larkin

I don't read novels whilst I'm writing one; I just haven't got a wide enough brain to concentrate on incoming and outgoing in the same time zone. ~ Dawn French

If he had never created Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston would be remembered for this experiment. He invented the lie detector test. A century on, it's still in use. It's also all over Wonder Woman. "Come, Elva, you'll have to take a lie detector test," Diana Prince tells Elva Dove, a secretary she suspects of spying, as she drags her down a hallway. "I'll ask you questions," Diana says, strapping Elva to the machine while Trevor looks on. "Answer truthfully or your blood pressure curve will go up. "Did you take that rubber report from the secret files?" Diana asks. "No, no!" Elva insists. "Well, I'll be jiggered," Trevor exclaims, reading the graph. "She is lying. ~ Jill Lepore

SHE Is A Wonderful Romantic Poem With Billions of Lines. Even If I Could, I Wouldn't Finish Reading HER In My Entire Life ... ~ Muhammad Imran Hasan

That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the least opportune moments. ~ Stephen King

I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep ~ Gloria E Anzaldua

I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Too much ends in smoke. ~ Toba Beta