Chomsky Reader Quotes

Eople would like to think there's somebody up there who knows what he's doing. Since we don't participate, we don't control and we don't even think about the questions of crucial importance, we hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence. Let's hope the ship has a captain, in other words, since we're not taking in deciding what's going on. I think that's a factor. But also, it is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues; they'd better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and control international affairs. ~ Noam Chomsky

The surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definitive, and concrete. The greatest writers - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare - are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures. ~ William Strunk Jr.

If there were but one thing I could hope for from the reader of the remainder of this book, it would be that he or she possesses the capacity to perceive the miraculous. ~ M. Scott Peck

If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works. ~ Noam Chomsky

Thus would I urge the reader to seek faith; but if he be unwilling, what more can I do? I have brought the horse to the water, but I cannot make him drink. This, however, be it remembered - unbelief is wilful when evidence is put in a man's way, and he refuses carefully to examine it. He that does not desire to know, and accept the truth, has himself to thank if he dies with a lie in his right hand. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions. ~ Rick Atkinson

The best headlines are those that appeal to the reader's self-interest, that is, headlines based on reader benefits. They offer readers something they want - and get from you. ~ John Caples

I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I'm not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime. Each of you was committing it in your own style. ~ Scott McCloud

There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stories: they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty is an art. The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn't know what to be honest about. He thinks a complicated murder scheme which baffled the lazy reader, who won't be bothered itemizing the details, will also baffle the police, whose business is with details. ~ Raymond Chandler

The problem for cookery-bookery writers like me is to understand the extent of our readers' experience. I hope have solved that riddle in my books by simply telling everything. The experienced cook will know to skip through the verbiage, but the explanations will be there for those who still need them. ~ Julia Child

(Who Did No Harm to No Man all the Dais of Her Life. Reader, Can You Say Lykewise?). ~ Neil Gaiman

Look, if you have a political movement that's strong enough that the power structure has to accommodate it, it'll get accommodated in some fashion-as in the case of union organizing rights here, the Wagner Act. But when that movement stops being active and challenging, those rights just aren't going to matter very much anymore. ~ Noam Chomsky

If you use a colloquialism or a slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better. ~ William Strunk Jr.

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well. ~ Amos Bronson Alcott

And I see you have not resisted their lure either." He motioned toward her books. "Might I look at your selections?" She hesitated and clutched her books closer out of habit. She had often felt that the books one read were a peek into the soul of the reader. That was why her personal library was kept in a locked room very separate from the places where her visitors went for her wild parties. Sharing these selections with Benedict felt so very intimate. ~ Jess Michaels

This, reader, is an honest book ... I want to appear in my simple, natural and everyday dress, without strain or artifice; for it is myself that I portray ~ Michel De Montaigne

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.
Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning. ~ Lawrence Hill

The writer doesn't write for the reader. He doesn't write for himself, either. He writes to serve ... something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness - those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings. ~ Joy Williams

Jane, I never meant to wound you thus ... Will you ever forgive me?
Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Character design, like story design, requires a hook to grab the reader's attention. ~ Ted Naifeh

On almost all issues, citizens could not identify the stands of the candidates
as intended. ~ Noam Chomsky

This is something I learned when I was working at a newspaper: when you put something on paper, whether it's words or pictures, and it's staring back at the reader, they are now alone in the room with them for as long as it takes them to turn the page. Whereas on television, the images fly by. ~ Brian Michael Bendis

I became a reader - thank God I became a reader. I lived in a dream world because it was a hell of a lot better world. ~ Gene Roddenberry

Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is THERE, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate. The logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses. ~ Ray Bradbury

Here I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I do not blame you. It is no easy road. ~ Gene Wolfe

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that. ~ Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet. ~ E. V. Lucas

It's dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy. ~ Noam Chomsky

My voice had bayou gut them slipping out of their story like a bookmark forgotten by a reader between the pages ~ Cornelia Funke

I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.) I will say that having read the best and worst of novels for many years, which is, to remind you, part of a good devil's education, I know by now that not even a loyal reader can stay true to an author who is ready to leave his narrative for an apparently unrelated expedition. ~ Norman Mailer

Hemingway used to write an ending to his novel only to delete it, asserting that it made the story stronger because the reader would always be able to intuit the ghost of that final, incorporeal passage. ~ Jessica Knoll

The U.N. charter bars the threat of force. ~ Noam Chomsky

The fluent reader sounds good, is easy to listen to, and reads with enough expression to help the listener understand and enjoy the material. ~ Charles Clark

I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader. ~ Stewart O'Nan

I don't think there's a less elitist thing on earth to do than to try and reach out and connect with another human being . . . And that's what the best writing does, that's what art does. It looks a reader in the eye, and it proceeds honestly with that reader, and nakedly. There is a compact there, a bond, a relationship, a union, a symbiosis . . . It's not about you. Whether you're a genius or an idiot savant. It's about the work. The work is more important than you. So it's not about back-claps and plaudits and "isn't that author smart." It's about, "this book really connected with me. And even though you, my friend, are very different from me, I'm lending it to you, because I think it will connect with you as well." Community. Across the eras. Between people who have never met, who will never meet, who are nonetheless bound in something together, in different ways. ~ Colin Fleming

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details. ~ Jonathan Lethem

If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can't be in books.
The book needs you. ~ Gary Paulsen

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response. ~ William Gibson

A real reader creates her own canon, for it consists precisely of those books that she has used to create herself. ~ William Deresiewicz

I imagine you will always be pinched for money, for time, for a place to work. But I think you will do it. And believe me, it is not a new problem. You are in good company ... Your touch is the uncommon touch; you will speak only to the thoughtful reader. And more times than once you will ask yourself whether such readers really exist at all and why you should go on projecting your words into silence like an old crazy actor playing the part of himself to an empty theater. ~ Wallace Stegner

I hope that when the characters in my novels dream beyond their current circumstance, it inspires the reader to do the same. ~ Kristine Scarrow

The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis's Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win a reader to his side. As Austin Farrer expressed it, We think we are listening to an argument; in fact we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction. ~ Humphrey Carpenter

The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism. ~ Noam Chomsky

Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can. ~ Chris Abani

The inherent non-linearity of the digital allows for more input from others, including the subject and reader as collaborators. The top-down, bedtime-style story is of limited use. A non-linear narrative that allows for increased complexity and depth, and encourages both subject and reader to have greater involvement, will eventually emerge more fully from the digital environment. This, in a sense, is the more profound democratization of media. ~ Fred Ritchin