Disgruntled Readers Quotes

And while in the olden days, disgruntled readers suffered pretty much in silence, now there's Amazon. The last thing you want are myriad scathing reviews that potential readers find helpful. ~ Lisa Cron

In terms of characters I wish I had created - just because I haven't dealt with anything like them - I'm really impressed by characters who can endure over time, whether that be a long series run like a Harry Bosch, or a character who endures over generations and continues to please readers: Sherlock Holmes. ~ Michael Koryta

[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don't exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, 'retouching artists' conspire to 'help' beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman's 60 year old face looks like in print because it's made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they're comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine. ~ Dalma Heyn

Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like "reify" in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people's stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Don't hire anyone - no matter what they offer - who promises you they'll sell 'X' copies of your book. Every book is different. The best any marketing company or PR firm can do for your book is make potential readers aware of it. ~ M.J. Rose

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing. ~ Pankaj Mishra

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. ~ David Foster Wallace

My agent pointed out one day that I had been quoted by a columnist in some American newspaper, and he noted with some glee that they simply identified me by name without reminding people who I was, apparently in the clear expectation that their readers would know who I am. ~ Terry Pratchett

At a conservative estimate, one million dollars will be spent by American readers for this book [For Whom the Bell Tolls]. They will get for their money 34 pages of permanent value. These 34 pages tell of a massacre happening in a little Spanish town in the early days of the Civil War...Mr. Hemingway: please publish the massacre scene separately, and then forget For Whom the Bell Tolls; please leave stories of the Spanish Civil War to Malraux... ~ Commonweal

To those great geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved reader's children, these men and things will be as much legend and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

A portable friend to all readers-especia lly but not only women-who need to learn that the Golden Rule works only if it's reversible: We must learn to treat ourselves as well as we wish to treat others. ~ Gloria Steinem

Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading - to reconnect to that community. ~ Jonathan Franzen

We lawyers do not write plain English. We use eight words to say what could be said in two. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas. Seeking to be precise, we become redundant. Seeking to be cautious, we become verbose. Our sentences twist on, phrase within clause within clause, glazing the eyes and numbing the minds of our readers. The result is a writing style that has, according to one critic, four outstanding characteristics. It is (1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous, and (4) dull. ~ Richard C. Wydick

The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?"
"To be a writer, you need readers."
"I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Thomas Hauser respects boxing and boxers. He gives readers insight into what happens in and out of the ring. Everything he writes is fair-minded and reality-based with a human touch. ~ Lennox Lewis

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real. ~ Clay Shirky

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers can hear the sounds. ~ James Laughlin

He without inspiration and motivation exists no more in a world full of innovations and inventions! ~ Darnaya Darice

Certain bookworms eat books. Eat them, swear in them, spill things on them. ~ Tara Bray Smith

For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table. ~ C.S. Lewis

[I]ndividual readers may conceivably choose (or be led) to regard a given text as literary in cases where such a response is not shared by others, but until their individual responses lose their idiosyncratic nature by being adopted by a larger interpretive community, such responses will be regarded as being to a greater or lesser degree aberrant, and the offender will be regarded as lacking in good taste or good sense or both. ~ Patrick O'Neill

In terms of identity? I'm a commercial fantasy writer, looking to entertain my audience with fantastical tales that mix history with myth and magic. That's something humans have been doing for a very long time, and I like being part of a long tradition of storytelling, whether that's ancient tales shared around a campfire or modern podcasts.
...
I'm currently editing a scene that involves winged lions and smoke-conjured armor, so I'm not certain I'm the best writer to ask about truth. But that being said, words and stories have great power and I think setting a scene that pulls from the real world but is set in a fictional one can cause readers to reassess and question things in a way they might not have otherwise. ~ S.A. Chakraborty

If we have people with the power to tell a story, there will always be readers. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. ~ Elmore Leonard

But in the book," I say, "the mockingbird is supposed to be a symbol of innocence. That's why it's a sin to kill one."
"Who says it's a symbol of innocence?" asks Mort.
"Teachers," I tell him. "Book reviewers, critics --"
"Wikipedia," Elena calls from behind the window display. ~ Paul Acampora

All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well. ~ Stephenie Meyer

Good. Item seven. The had had and that that problem. Lady Cavendish, weren't you working on this?'

Lady Cavendish stood up and gathered her thoughts. 'Indeed. The uses of had had and that that have to be strictly controlled; they can interrupt the imaginotransference quite dramatically, causing readers to go back over the sentence in confusion, something we try to avoid.'

'Go on.'

'It's mostly an unlicensed-usage problem. At the last count David Copperfield alone had had had had sixty three times, all but ten unapproved. Pilgrim's Progress may also be a problem due to its had had/that that ratio.'

'So what's the problem in Progress?'

'That that had that that ten times but had had had had only thrice. Increased had had usage had had to be overlooked, but not if the number exceeds that that that usage.'

'Hmm,' said the Bellman, 'I thought had had had had TGC's approval for use in Dickens? What's the problem?'

'Take the first had had and that that in the book by way of example,' said Lady Cavendish. 'You would have thought that that first had had had had good occasion to be seen as had, had you not? Had had had approval but had had had not; equally it is true to say that that that that had had approval but that that other that that had not.'

'So the problem with that other that that was that…?'

'That that other-other that that had had approval.'

'Okay' said ~ Jasper Fforde

My purpose is to entertain and please myself. I feel that if I am entertained, then there will be enough other readers who will be entertained, too. ~ Elmore Leonard

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large. ~ Aberjhani

My new favorite quote is, Feed kids Cokes and french fries and you get an obesity crisis. Feed them mental junk food and you get non-readers and poor thinkers. ~ Joy Hakim

As readers, as people, we might not have the capacity to change the justice system. But as Dylan says in the book, we can change one person's perspective at a time. We can notice. We can speak up. We can teach this generation, my generation, that the way sexual assault is viewed and treated in this country is not okay, so that when it is our turn to step into the shoes of political office and criminal justice, we can continue changing the narrative from a place of power.
And more than anything, we can support. And we can empower. We can love.
We can be better. ~ Cora Carmack

Your teacher did not want to be a teacher. He wanted to be a meter reader at the electric utility. Meter readers do not have to put up with children, work comparatively little, and what is more important, have greater opportunity for corruption and are hence both better off and held in higher regard by society. ~ Mohsin Hamid

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible. ~ C.S. Lewis

Readers want to know a few things right up front, like what the weather is like and the lay of the land, the color of that lake, or the steep pitch of that steeple. Now whether or not these things have one iota to do with your story doesn't concern the reader. ~ Ron Rozelle

I think What Dreams May Come is the most important (read effective) book I've written. It has caused a number of readers to lose their fear of death the finest tribute any writer could receive ... Somewhere In Time is my favorite novel. ~ Richard Matheson

Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence. ~ Nancy Kress

...Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, a brilliant reenvisioning of one's own city as an exotic locale. Sue, who was too poor to travel, turned an awed gaze to the familiar and gave his readers a city they would recognize but which hid a poetry far from the familiar. ~ Andrei Codrescu

Since many are confronted with an eerie void, lacking essential qualities in their daily repertoire and suffering from missing out on a second or third dimension in their lives, they feel disjointed and disgruntled, unconsciously struggling to find out a kind of strategy to "construct" or to "reconstruct" their living. ("Bread and Satellite") ~ Erik Pevernagie

I am grateful to all my readers; you inspired me to keep writing. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

That is the "real" reader, the Dear Reader for whom every writer writes. And many Dear Readers will become writers in their turn. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We hear the voice of a book speaking to us. ~ Margaret Atwood

Yoshihiro Togashi here. I'm back doing a weekly serial, and here I am publishing my first volume already. Thanks to all my readers for their support. I am entirely indebted to you. I took this picture (it is a photo of Togashi wearing a rabbit mask) at a certain party by the way, not a shady membership club. I'll work hard to crank out dozens of volumes. I promise not to complain. I won't run away. I won't lose it. I think. Maybe. ~ Yoshihiro Togashi

Observation:

Thanks to technological advances, avid readers seem to be replacing DTBAD (Dead Tree Book Acquisition Disorder) with an alphabet soup of more more modern-day hoarding behaviors: EBAD (E-Book Acquistion Disorder), EGAD (Electronic Gadget Acquisition Disorder), and ABAD (Audiobook Acquisition Disorder). Of course, there's also MYBAD (Movie and YouTube Acquisition Disorder: the hoarding or obsessive viewing of digital films and videos, some based on books). If any of these syndromes describes you, take heart: there's probably an app for that! - 8/9/2013 ~ Lisa Tolliver

In the ideal public library, we are all readers of the "middling sort." Reading whatever we will, we fulfill a public function, preserving the sacrosanct space of inner thought that is our birthright. Assaults on that birthright in the forms of legislation, surveillance, and censorship ultimately are precisely as dangerous as our acquiescence in them. ~ Matthew Battles

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why. ~ Jim Harrison

David Foster Wallace: What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit - to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we're mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop ... and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do. ~ David Lipsky

It's always hard, when introducing readers to a new world/set of rules, not to lay it all out manual-style in the opening chapters but make sure to put the action and the characters at the front. If people don't become invested in them and in the story, the world in which it's set will become a burden. ~ V.E Schwab

Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images, ~ Steven Pinker