Readership Quotes

Newspaper readership is still growing in India. ~ Bill Gates

The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I've always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it. ~ Richard Adams

My blog readership grew steadily as I started to dump more of my inner self onto the page. I ~ Amanda Palmer

My purpose is to create a mirror for the reader to see themselves, to create a light for people to see themselves in the characters, pictures, and stories. So they resonate. ~ Kadir Nelson

Lending my voice to a dedicated readership is a match made in heaven. ~ R. Barri Flowers

Newspapers abound, and though they have endured decades of decline in readership and influence, they can still form impressive piles if no one takes them out to the trash. ~ Jon Stewart

I'm a cult writer now. I have a cult readership. ~ Michael Gruber

For people who have been raised to expect books to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, it is hard for them to read and appreciate serious fiction. That's not good. The problem isn't that today's readership is "dumb," I don't think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture's trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today's readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard. ~ David Foster Wallace

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant. ~ Lawrence Clark Powell

Internationalism' is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership. ~ Amit Chaudhuri

I wanted to think about ways to get an American readership concerned with what is happening in Mexico, but also to reframe it as a problem Americans share. ~ Sarah Stillman

That ideal had become as ossified as the statue of Benjamin Franklin up there. From New York to Los Angeles, American newspapers were yellow and stale before they even came off the press. Dog-beaten by a dwindling readership, financial losses and partisan attacks, editors had stripped them of their personality in an attempt to offend no one. And so there was no more reason to read them. Safety before Truth. Grammar over Guts. Winners before Losers. My eyes traveled down from Franklin to the iron sconces above the entrance. ~ Charlie LeDuff

I try to be careful about wording. One of the things I've tried to combat in my blog is the notion that journalists are arrogant and unconcerned with the readership. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof

Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

The first time I opened one I felt indecent. I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? as Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don't. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of the writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership. ~ Niall Williams

If it were not for the fact that editors have become so timorous in these politically correct times, I would probably have a greater readership than I have. ~ Pat Oliphant

An artist without an audience is like a jar without jelly. There doesn't always need to be much jelly in the jar, nevertheless a jar without jelly would feel jealous and empty. ~ Kevin Focke

I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history. ~ Elizabeth Kostova

I am glad to have found a readership, but one can't write only what is likely to sell. A writer is not a shopkeeper. A writer creates an imaginary world that he transmits to others. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

The idea of harnessing the intelligence of the readership has been lost in the quest for Facebook likes. For many, readers have become synonymous with hateful commenters. It's time for a renewed push to realize some of the original dreams of the web. ~ Nick Denton

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it's being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn't have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing - maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world. ~ Don DeLillo

The fuzzy boundary lines between different readership ages have always puzzled me, so these days I just write what comes, and assume I can fix the mess later with an editor's help. ~ Julie Berry

This is a wonderful book, unique and engaging. Diaconis and Graham manage to convey the awe and marvels of mathematics, and of magic tricks, especially those that depend fundamentally on mathematical ideas. They range over many delicious topics, giving us an enchanting personal view of the history and practice of magic, of mathematics, and of the fascinating connection between the two cultures. Magical Mathematics will have an utterly devoted readership. ~ Barry Mazur

Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column. ~ Dave Barry

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element. ~ Irvine Welsh

No other serial publications carry a number on them that is of any weight to their readership. The number is there to serve a function, but it has no intrinsic value in and of itself. It's comfort food and nostalgia at best. On this, we follow what you and your fellow readers do more than what you say. We hear complaints about renumbering every time we do it, but every time we do it it results in higher sales, which is the whole ballgame - so if it were your time and your effort, what would you do? ~ Tom Brevoort

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

'City of Fallen Angels' ended on a cliffhanger. That was equally loved and hated by my readership. ~ Cassandra Clare

I wanted to write a book that maybe had the potential to go beyond the Deadspin and KSK [Kissing Suzy Kolber] readership. ~ Drew Magary

An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good."
In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves - this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it. ~ Susan Bell

People assume that because I'm a girl and my blog is hot pink that my readership is 90% women, but it's not. It's probably only about 65%. When I do tours, it's pretty much the same thing: it's about one-third guys. ~ Jenny Lawson

I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life - from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has also given me enormous confidence. ~ Daniel Tammet

There was a further, rather crazy reason why Neil was my dream batsman. In the 1950s, pop music was innocent and melodic. Top among the vocalists who escorted me through my youth was little Guy Mitchell. That plaintive, joyous, carefree voice gave us Truly Fair and My Heart Cries for You, crystal-clear melodies that lifted and sustained anxious teenagers, exactly as did Neil Harvey's dainty batsmanship. Neil was a study in cream: no commercial logos then (least of all affixed to the white boundary pickets or splattered even more intrusively across the sacred turf), just a clean bat wielded by a young chap with shirt-sleeves rolled high, pads gleaming white, dark hair unencumbered by cap or sunhat (let alone helmet), head slightly tilted as he walked.

"Consequently, whenever I watched Harvey play, a Guy Mitchell song would float through my head. And whenever I listened to those 78rpm records at home, they sparked visions of Neil Harvey at the crease. So I've now confessed to a modern readership. And if that portrays the young me as a dreamer, anchored securely in a world of innocence and joy, so be it. Despite all the tensions and crises that life has thrown up, little has changed. I owe a lot to Neil Harvey. ~ David Frith

In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it. ~ Tim Berners-Lee

And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others. ~ Ben Lerner

People say, "Well, you went on television, it enlarged your readership." It did not at all, not at all. I might as well tell you, I lost some readership, because the profound audience felt somehow bothered by my too easy manner. ~ Jerzy Kosinski

A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience. ~ Robert Harris

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely. ~ John Le Carre

I realized early in my career that precisely what one reader
doesn't like is what another reader loves. Collectively, any writer's audience presents a mishmash of expectations that can never all be met. What one-tenth of my readership may not be crazy about the other nine-tenths savors. The moment you start altering a book or a painting or any type of art as if it's a public collaborative, you crucify its soul. I'd rather irritate a few people and delight a lot than touch no one." ~ Karen Marie Moning ~ Karen Marie Moning

Mythopoeia has taken off in the Indian diaspora because there has been a change in readership from a mature audience to a younger one. This lot has a desperate yearning to reconnect. They want to consume mythology but in a well-packaged and easily digestible way. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

Tad Homer-Dixon is a rare kind of public intellectual, who combines real expertise with a commitment to communicate to the widest possible readership. In The Ingenuity Gap he wants us all to wake-up to the fearful possibility that our blithe trust in science and technology may be misplaced. Human ingenuity may not be capable of coping with two emerging crises of this century and the next: population growth and environmental despoliation. Read Homer Dixon's wake-up call and you will see the future very differently. ~ Michael Ignatieff

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership. ~ Joshua Ferris

I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media ... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start. ~ Anne McCaffrey

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you're writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you'll never dumb things down. You won't have to explain things that don't need explaining. You'll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don't wish to be condescended to. I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not "audience." Not "readership." Just the reader. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The wider your readership, the greater the chances of offending your readers. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

But insecurity remains the hallmark of Pakistan's political and intellectual conversation. Even a comment about, say, Pakistan's relatively low ranking among nations for book readership, is portrayed as an attack on the idea of Pakistan. ~ Husain Haqqani

While I'm critical to the Bush presidency, it's been enormously beneficial for Salon because we're seen as kind of an aggressive watchdog on the Bush White House. Particularly since Florida, our readership hit a whole new level, and we held onto those readers. ~ David Talbot

A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation. ~ Lorin Stein

My readership seems to be the sensitive people, for the most part. Then there are the occasional fans who are like, "Ah, video games!" ~ Bryan Lee O'Malley

I always say these two things: Begin the begin, and don't take anything personally. You have to start to finish! There will always be a reason not to write; find your "why" and keep it in front of you. It's also important for authors to understand that someone somewhere is going to hate their work. You aren't writing for every reader; you're writing for the right reader! All of that being said; if your right readership is really small, you need to decide you're okay with that. ~ Liv Hadden

I'm sometimes sort of in touch with the readership, and they seem to have perceptive questions, for the most part. ~ Bryan Lee O'Malley

Interviewer ...In the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain--or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing -- flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc. -- is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In da ~ David Foster Wallace

Going to so many book events keeps me connected with my readership while constantly reminding me that all the long hours at the drawing desk are worthwhile. ~ Raina Telgemeier

What do you read?

I read what friends tell me is good. This explains the book's success, partially. It got very good reviews. Good reviews will get you a readership right away, but that's it. The review or the article appears one day in a magazine or a newspaper, then it's gone. Word of mouth is a continuing phenomenon, much more powerful. ~ John Berendt

Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos. ~ Edmund White

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so ... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games. ~ Haruki Murakami

If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it's only a click away. ~ Timothy Ferriss

This is a forum for readers. Authors walk these halls at their own risk. I've been to the Coliseum in Rome. GR is just that. Books are gladiators. Readers are ravenous citizens awaiting their next bite of entertainment, all Caesars with thumbs readied for judgement. Even champions fall prey to sword now and then. And you know what they say about the pen and the sword…the analogy is a bit muddled, but it's in there somewhere. ~ Willow Madison

In the 1950s we use to feel that television was taking away our comic readership; with today's exciting, powerfully visual movies I have to wonder about their effect on the kids' loyalty to the comic book medium all over again. ~ Joe Simon

Obviously Feministing is kind of a women's space in a certain way, even though we have a lot of male readership and people who don't identify as women. ~ Jessica Valenti

A newspaper that reduces its coverage of the news important to its community is certain to reduce its readership as well ~ Warren Buffett

I think continuity is the devil. I think it's constricting and restrictive, I think it's alienating and off-putting, and it inflicts an artifact of linear time as we experience it on something that exists outside of linear time as well as keeps new readership away by keeping comics a matter of trivia and history rather than actual stories. ~ Matt Fraction

In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all. ~ Susan Sontag

I try to write stories that will attract younger readers and make them feel part of a wider readership. I do not feel able to write books that are about, or even for, teenagers; and I am inclined to be suspicious of books which 'target' them. ~ Mal Peet

I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not "audience." Not "readership." Just the reader. That one person, alone in a room, whose time I'm asking for. I want my books to be worth the reader's time, and that's why I don't publish the books I've written that don't meet this criterion, and why I don't publish the books I do until they're ready. The novels I love are novels I live for. They make me feel smarter, more alive, more tender toward the world. I hope, with my own books, to transmit that same experience, to pass it on as best I can. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I have been investigating this modern problem of decline in readership and my conclusion is that it has little to do with bad readership and a whole lot with a difference in information speed. Frankly, the modern brain is much faster than the classical brain was in how it absorbs information and novels do not reflect this development. They are simply not dense enough. Too slow, not the right tempo - bores the shit out of a modern brain! There's the real problem: our brains have developed into different speed levels that authors cant adjust to. It has nothing whatsoever to do with quality: it has rather a whole lot to do with people claiming to be authors who are incapable of concentrating their ideas in the right sort of space, and rather smear out a few already halfbaked ideas over 30 plus pages. Hello! Do you think its weird a facebooktrained mind, capable of digesting enormous amounts of information at quick speeds, is bored shitless with that? The problem is not bad readership but rather bad authorship: authors that cannot adjust to the times. And since there are a zillion books published every day of authors that just cant keep up with the speed of the times, and criticism hardly exists anymore in modern society, it becomes simply very unattractive to read books, unless one keeps to the classics, which are books that are much more dense at essence. ~ Martijn Benders

Never change the URL of your blog. I've done it once, and I lost much of my readership. It took several months to build up the same reader patterns and trust. ~ Robert Scoble

Authors whose books were selected as ASEs were rewarded with a loyal readership of millions of men. Word spread quickly about the titles that were perennial favorites, even reaching the home front. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which was written in 1925, was considered a failure during Fitzgerald's lifetime. But when this book was printed as an ASE in October 1945, it won the hearts of an army of men. Their praise reverberated back home, and The Great Gatsby was rescued from obscurity and has since become an American literary classic. ~ Molly Guptill Manning

It's all about the integrity of their characters. They [Marvel] care so much about the loyalty and integrity of each and every character and all of their stories. They trust and love their readership. They're the ones who have invested in these stories. ~ Ray Stevenson

The summary of Lambert and Lillenfelt's "Bloodstains" in Scientific American Mind in the October 12, 2007 The Informed Reader passes along many of these authors' strong opinions on complex and controversial topics without informing the readership that the authors' perspective is extreme, polarized, and vulnerable to challenge at many crucial points.
It is clear that false memories can be implanted in about 25% of subjects, when those memories concern issues in the normal and expectable range of experience. However, about 75% of subjects resist such efforts, and efforts to implant memories of abuse or offensive medical procedures are almost universally rejected. Therefore a wholesale attack against therapies that explore patients' memories is unwarranted. "Recovered Memory Therapy" is not a school of treatment. It is a slur used to mischaracterize approaches offensive to the authors' perspectives, designed to evoke an emotional bias against those to whom the slur is applied. ~ Richard P. Kluft

The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing. ~ Isabel Allende

I don't like to think of my readership as 'fans,' a word which has always suggested a kind of power relationship I'm uncomfortable with. ~ Grant Morrison

The experience that a publication creates for its audience is the very essence of that publication's brand - and without deep engagement, that publication's brand will be weak. A good publication is a convener and an arbiter - it expresses a core narrative that becomes a badge of sorts for its readership. ~ John Battelle

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'? ~ Margaret Atwood

Most blogs have very low readership - perhaps only the blogger's mother or best friend reads them - but even writing for one person, compared to writing for nobody, seems to be enough to compel millions of people to blog. ~ Dan Ariely

A blog is a message in a bottle, both in purpose and likely readership. ~ Robert Breault

Theodor Geisel (otherwise known as Dr. Seuss) spent his workdays ensconced in his private studio, the walls lined with sketches and drawings, in a bell-tower outside his La Jolla, California, house. Geisel was a much more quiet man than his jocular rhymes suggest. He rarely ventured out in public to meet his young readership, fretting that kids would expect a merry, outspoken, Cat in the Hat–like figure, and would be disappointed with his reserved personality. "In mass, [children] terrify me," he admitted. ~ Susan Cain

It's so much easier to write for a person in your life than to write for some imagined readership, so you write something that's more intimate and true. ~ Jonah Peretti

A readership crisis is really a leadership crisis. ~ Michael Hyatt

[The public intellectual] will also describe how she can work a pop culture reference into her essay, comparing the Supreme Court to the creature in the number-one box office movie of the moment. Editors like this sort of mass-media integration, first, because it gives them a way to illustrate the piece, and second because they are under the delusion that pop-culture references will propel a piece's readership into the five-digit area. ~ David Brooks

How many times in life have I been advised to "toe the line," to "tone it down," to stop "pushing the envelope"? As a journalist, I had to keep my opinions to myself for 30 years. I thought that, as an artist, I'd have the liberty to express my views. Now I'm told that doing so might hurt my readership.
I'm so idealistic, as I said elsewhere on FB today, that I think people ought to read my books because they're good. Period. ~ Sherry Jones

I have no idea what readership is of written editorials, but it doesn't come anywhere close to the readership of editorial cartoons. ~ Paul Conrad

I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me. ~ Louis Menand

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other. ~ Kenneth Koch

The diversity revolution [in the news media] was supposed to increase readership and enhance credibility. Just the opposite has resulted. How long will it take the business to figure this out? ~ John Leo

When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art. ~ James Arthur

There is a wealth of readership for regional language literature in India that is not given importance. We must give respect to our own languages. ~ Amish Tripathi

Starting the blog was a way for me to generate this nonfiction first-person voice naturally, gradually, without feeling performance anxiety. It felt a bit like keeping journals when I was younger, but connecting to an instant readership without having to wait for publication made it also immediately satisfying. ~ Kate Christensen

My first book didn't even have a Canadian publisher. And that upset me, because I so wanted a readership up there. ~ Patrick DeWitt

As someone who writes and teaches YA fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to define its character and readership, and I don't think I'm alone - genres are all about boundary drawing, and the YA genre is, in a lot of ways, about carving out boundaries around adolescence, a space for teenagers to do teenage things. ~ Robin Wasserman

If words come alive on the page, the writer succeeds in connecting to the reader. ~ Aman Jassal

It just got ugly in the 1970s for New Journalism, hastened by the decline of general interest magazine. So what happened? Television, mostly, which siphoned away readers and ad dollars, turned celebrity culture into a growth industry, and assured the end of Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and Collier's – magazine that had published Mailer, Didion, Hersey, and many others. Esquire, New York, and Rolling Stones were no longer must-reads for an engaged readership that couldn't wait for the next issue to arrive in their mailboxes, eager to find out what Wolfe, Talese, Thompson, and the rest had in store for them. As the seventies drew to a close, so, too, did the last golden era of American journalism.
But there was also a sense of psychic exhaustion – that the great stories had all been told and there was nothing left to write about. ~ Marc Weingarten

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership. ~ Susan Vreeland