A Quote by Adam Haslett

As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

Adam Haslett

Quote Topics

Dwell Far Inside Job Judge Reader See Take Them Writer

Quote Author

Adam Haslett
American - Writer
Born: December 24, 1970

It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.

Fay Weldon

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader. And so, as a reader you have a task to do in finding those bottles and opening up the messages and experiencing what's in them inside of yourself.

Edward Hirsch

My job as the writer is to fool you. Your job as the reader is to see if you can catch me at it.

Sue Grafton

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

George Saunders

It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

Ethan Canin

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

Ruth Reichl

I don't live with my head in the sand - I see people's flaws. I don't like everything my friends do or say. But one, I don't judge or reprimand them to their face because it's not my job to tell them they're screwing up; it's just my job to love them.

Teresa Giudice

We think that because we dwell inside our bodies that we are separate from other people who dwell inside theirs.

Marianne Williamson

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them. It's my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

Quentin Tarantino

It isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader.

Robert Bringhurst

We must be forewarned that only rarely does a text easily lend itself to the reader's curiosity... the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between the reader and writer. It is a composition between the reader and the writer in which the reader "rewrites" the text making a determined effort not to betray the author's spirit.

Paulo Freire

[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

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.

Garth Stein

As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.

Billy Collins

I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.