What we need is a good opening sentence. Something that will smack the reader right between the eyes, and then take him on a virtual roller-coaster ride of self-awareness and discovery.
— Jerry Perzigian, Don Seigel, Frasier Crane, Kelsey Grammer, imdb.com
A good writer, like a good reader, has a mind's ear...writers need to hear as they write.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.
She is the kind of girl who lives for poetry old and new, But in her heart the poems she loves most are only two, one is about regret, the other is about you.
For the reader, a work of art can make a kind of mantra: by giving form to devastation, the poem rescues the reader from a darkness without shape or gravity; it is an island in a free fall; it becomes his companion in grief, his rescuer, a proof that suffering can be made somehow to yield meaning.
I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.
For certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them.
I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book…
A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.
I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructe…
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.
When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.
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