Response To A Reader S Question Quotes

I don't wait for inspiration. Writing is my job. ~ Gail Carson Levine

Perhaps this new kind of reading will appeal to us after we give it a try. ~ S.A. Tawks

This second volume of letters begins at that point, and the reader soon discovers what a 'tremendous difference' conversion to Christianity made in Lewis. In the Family Letters Lewis was struggling to find his voice as a poet; in the letters included in this volume he had, it seems, found many voices. He writes on such a wide range of subjects that some readers will wonder if, perhaps, there was more than one C. S. Lewis. ~ C.S. Lewis

You are Zyon's daughter. You are a soul reader. This trip is more than just a vacation," Jadan said firmly. "You might feel like postponing it now, but we need to look for the medallion while we are in that region. Joe will keep an eye on everything. Plus, your mom will know what to do. I can even call for backup. ~ Dianne Bright

In 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers provided a detailed analysis of that creative process in The Mind of the Maker. She developed the relevance of the imago Dei for understanding artistic creation in explicitly trinitarian terms. In every act of creation there is a controlling idea (the Father), the energy which incarnates that idea through craftsmanship in some medium (the Son), and the power to create a response in the reader (the Spirit). These three, while separate in identity, are yet one act of creation. So the ancient credal statements about the Trinity are factual claims about the mind of the maker created in his image. Sayers delves into the numerous literary examples, in what is one of the most fascinating accounts ever written both of the nature of literature and of the imago Dei. While some readers may feel she has a tendency to take a good idea too far, The Mind of the Maker remains an indispensable classic of Christian poetics. ~ Leland Ryken

With this book I hope what I always hope - that readers will nod their heads (not constantly, you know, but at the odd juncture) and think, "Yes, that's exactly right." This is why we write, and this is why we read. It's an act of communication, and if what you're communicating is true - if you haven't screwed it up (and there are so many ways to do that) - the response of your ideal reader isn't "Wow! What a fabulous sentence!" or "Wow! I did not know that!" It's "Yes. Exactly. I felt that too once, and I forgot it until now, and I thought I was the only one. ~ Jincy Willett

He could tell her that dogs used to look like cats and vice versa without a lick of proof and it would change the way she regarded the animals. ~ S.A. Tawks

Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

Too much thought can find fault in anything, even if there is no fault to be found. ~ S.A. Tawks

Like when you pick up a book and you don't realize what type of text it is - it could be an essay, a novel, a biography - and at one point you realize you don't know where, as a reader, you want to be. Where are you going with this text? What is the goal? How are you supposed to interpret what you're reading? And people's responses vary - some dislike it, and are put off by the confusion, the lack of comprehension. ~ Sergio Chejfec

I think of writing as a partnership with the reader. My goal is to feed their imagination, but only partially. If you give them everything, you limit their ability. It's borderline insulting. The key with description is to give the reader just enough so they experience what's going on, but leave a little out so they're encouraged to fill in the blanks. This is where the magic happens. Let them breathe life into your story in a way only they can. ~ S.J. Pierce

He sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine. ~ Stephen King

What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning. ~ T. S. Eliot

I would say that my ideal of writing history is to give the reader vicarious experience. You're born in one particular century at a particular time, and the only experience you can have directly is of the place you live and the time you live in. History is a way of giving you experience that you would otherwise be cut off from. ~ Edmund S. Morgan

i think any poem worth its salt, if poems can indeed be salty, should allow the reader to think. this poem is of course a chronological poem tracing the development of humans through the movement of black women. i have no feelings that the poem is exclusive of any one but i wanted to write a sassy hands-on-the-hips poem from the understanding that i am a woman and indeed was once a girl. i think it works because the more you know about anthropology and history the more you can follow what i am saying; on the other hand you can be a little child with no previous experiences and catch the joy of the poem. it goes from the first human bones discovered all the way to the space age. what has been included is as important to me as what has been excluded. what i strove to do was show progress, movement, humor and a bit of pride.

this is the most i've ever commented on any poem of mine since i tend to agree with t.s. eliot when he said a poet was the last person to know what the poem was/is about. ~ Nikki Giovanni

You've told a good story in a skillful manner. I like it that you haven't moralized about your heroine's mistakes. You've made it difficult for the reader not to sympathize with her."
"I sympathize with her," Amanda said frankly. "I've always thought it would be the worst kind of horror to be trapped in a loveless marriage. So many women are forced to marry because of pure economics. If more women were able to support themselves, there would be fewer reluctant brides and unhappy wives."
"Why, Miss Briars," he said softly. "How unconventional of you."
She countered his amusement with a perplexed frown. "It's only sensible, really."
He realized suddenly that this was the key to understanding her. Amanda was so doggedly practical that she was willing to discard the hypocrisies and stale social attitudes that most people accepted without thinking. Why, indeed, should a woman marry just because it was the expected thing to do, if she were able to choose otherwise?
"Perhaps most women think it is easier to marry than support themselves," he said, deliberately provoking her.
"Easier?" she snorted. "I've never seen a shred of evidence that spending the rest of one's days in domestic drudgery is any easier than working at some trade. What women need is more education, more choices, and then they will be able to consider options for themselves other than marriage. ~ Lisa Kleypas

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

Trying to convey beauty in war was a technique to try to prevent the reader from looking away or turning the page in response to something horrible. I wanted them to linger, to ask questions. ~ Lynsey Addario

I stroked a big red A on top of his paper. Looked at it for a moment or two, then added a big red +. Because it was good, and because his pain had evoked an emotional reaction in me, his reader. And isn't that what A+ writing is supposed to do? Evoke a response? ~ Stephen King

Ever since I could remember reading, I was a fan of Horror Novels, then just an Avid reader of all things dark and deeply written or off the cuff styles and not so bland and sterile as if the grammar police forensically wrote it to be safe, then re-edited it to be even more annoyingly not from an emotion but from a text book, I love dark dark fiction that's why i write it. Some of my favorite writers are Anne Rice, Hunter S. Thompson and Clive Barker, perhaps you can sense this in my writing. ~ Liesalette

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. ~ C.S. Lewis

I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character. ~ Joe Abercrombie

I want all my books to provoke some kind of response in the reader, to make them think something or feel something or both, and for that to become a part of them and work into their own lives. ~ Linda Sue Park

Children's literature is considerably more functional than a good portion of adult literature. If I were cynical, I might say: Children's books are written to be read; adult books are written to be talked about at cocktail parties.
There may be more truth that cynicism in that statement. My impression is that many adult books are written only to shock the reader (a short term goal, since shock quickly turns into boredom) or as calisthenics for the author's ego.
On the other hand, children's literature seems an area where books function as they were meant to; where they amaze, delight, and move our emotions. We can respect and admire any number of current adult books, but I find it hard to love them. ~ Lloyd Alexander

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen it long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity that he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton has more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called "tinny". It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books. ~ C.S. Lewis

The sisterhood of librarians is a non-profit organisation and our goal is to keep imagination alive, not make money. ~ S.A. Tawks

Men cannot be nice and kind to a woman and have no affection for them. ~ S.A. Tawks

I don't claim to know everything, Wally. I only claim that everything can eventually be known. ~ S.A. Tawks

who can describe beauty? The reader may smile at this as the far-off echo of a precocious calf love, but he will be wrong. There are beauties so unambiguous that they need no lens of that kind to reveal them; they are visible even to the careless and objective eyes of a child. ~ C.S. Lewis

What is actually happening inside readers as they read? Each reader has a unique emotional response to a story. It's unpredictable, but it's real. Readers read under the influence of their own temperaments, histories, biases, morality, likes, dislikes, and peeves. They make judgments that don't agree with yours. So how can a writer predict, never mind control, what readers feel? Psychological ~ Donald Maass

Fear doesn't gain respect. It just makes people do what you want to shut you up and get you away from them. ~ S.A. Tawks

The digital world has allowed me a connection with my reader that I'd never had before. I didn't meet the people who read my material. The fan letters were mostly answered by professional people that'd done them for a living. And I didn't have any daily connection with their response to my work. I didn't have a relationship with my audience. And every artist should have it. ~ Berkeley Breathed

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature's seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions"

Bukusai Ashagawa ~ Bukusai Ashagawa

ARE YOU ASKING ME WHAT THOUGHTS YOU SHOULD THINK?? What kind of Orwellian police state do you think I'm running here? Think whatever thoughts come into your thinking device, sir. (response to a reader asking what to keep in mind while reading Warm Bodies) ~ Isaac Marion

I urge you strongly not to give Stop the Goodreads Bullies traffic. Their initial postings were all doxings of reviewers ... There are a lot of arguments on the legitimacy of doxing, but I think most reasonable people would agree that the response to a negative - not even libelous - review should not be the open posting of a reviewer's address. That's not the counter of speech by more speech, but with an implicit threat. It's not that you're wrong, and here's why; it's that I know where you live. ~ G.R. Reader

I live, at all times, for imaginative fiction; for ambivalence, not instruction. When language serves dogma, then literature is lost. I live also, and only, for excellence. My care is not for the cult of egalitarian mediocrity that is sweeping the world today, wherein even the critics are no longer qualified to differentiate, but for literature, which you may notice I have not defined. I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, 'literature' is: words that provoke a response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is a but an option.

"Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world.

"It is a paradox: yet one so important I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth."

"It is one of the main errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the 'original form' of myth can be separated from its ~ Alan Garner

Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer. ~ Y.S. Lee

I do. I feel wonderful. Are you sure it's Carol Mardus?" "Yes. Certainly. It shouldn't have taken me so long." "Who and what is she?" "She got Dick started. She was a reader at Distaff, and she got Manny Upton to take Dick's stories. Then later he made her fiction editor. She is now." "Fiction editor of Distaff?" "Yes." "She wasn't on your list." "No, I didn't think of her. I've only seen her two or three times." "C-A-R-O-L? M-A-R-D-I-S?" "U-S." "Married?" "No. As far as I know. She was married to Willis Krug, and divorced. ~ Rex Stout

There is nothing like the moment you connect with a reader! Nothing like the response that you get when what you have written touches someone in some way. It's a moment in which your work is almost a co-creation, you and the reader joining forces to make your words live. ~ Dani Harper

It had been communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of women that a female's nose must never shine. In war, in famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick without the requisite face powder. … I was taunted by the problem: how could someone write something like the 'Symposium' and make sure her nose did not shine at the same time? It didn't matter to me that I was reading a translation. I'd read Plato's brilliant, dense prose and not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose. It didn't hurt, it didn't make noise, it didn't incapacitate in any way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one. ~ Andrea Dworkin

You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made - an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country - an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make s ~ Murray Leinster

The purpose of the Sisterhood of Librarians is to keep the secret of creative juice and keep the idea of libraries alive. ~ S.A. Tawks

Too many questions can cripple imagination, for how can you apply logical questions to something that is not real? ~ S.A. Tawks

Never ask about the details of someone's personal life, only the quality. Because if they want you to know, they'll let you know. If they don't want you to know, there is no need to know. ~ S.A. Tawks

A good book tells a story, and the reader is either pleased or displeased, intrigued or bored. A great book invites the reader to respond, to argue, to challenge. ~ Harold S. Kushner

The fairy tale is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did. All stories in which children have adventures and successes which are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations…

This distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes - things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an askesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease. ~ C.S. Lewis

An intense response to a work will have its roots in the capacities and experiences already present in the personality and mind of the reader. ~ Louise M. Rosenblatt

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

If you find that the reader of popular romances
however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances
goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry. ~ C.S. Lewis

A great poet can give wings to abstract thoughts that touch a reader's mind with the ecstasy of joy. ~ Debasish Mridha