The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Ursula K. Le Guin

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.
George F. Kennan

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
Norman Cousins

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
Joan Didion

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
Dan Simmons

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
Anatole Broyard

To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.
David Foster Wallace

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
Margaret Fuller

Too many ads that try not to go over the reader's head end up beneath his notice.
Leo Burnett

Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.
Sidney Sheldon

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.
David Foster Wallace

Well, it's a humor strip, so my first responsibility has always been to entertain the reader... But if, in addition, I can help move readers to thought and judgment about issues that concern me, so much the better.
Garry Trudeau

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

What makes a story is how well it manages to connect with the reader, the visceral effect it has.
Len Wein

Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.
Henry Miller

When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.
William Collins

When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

When I read, I'm purely a reader.
Anne Tyler

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.
Charlotte Mary Yonge