A Quote by Edward Abbey

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

Edward Abbey

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Book Critics Determine Fate People Readers

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Edward Abbey
American - Author
January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

James Russell Lowell

A reader is entitled to believe what he or she believes is consonant with the facts of the book. It is not unusual that readers take away something that is spiritually at variance from what I myself experienced. That's not to say readers make up the book they want. We all have to agree on the facts. But readers bring their histories and all sets of longings. A book will pluck the strings of those longings differently among different readers.

Richard Ford

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

Lynne Tillman

When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.

Amish Tripathi

If you put a pink cover on something, critics make a certain set of assumptions and may not even read the book. But my readers are happy with it.

Jennifer Weiner

Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.

Mitch Albom

A person does not choose his or her fate; he or she only fulfills it. We are bound by our fate as long as we accept the values that determine it.

Alexander Lowen

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings - as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The people who relate to Playboy, both readers and people who produce it, are not the way the critics think they are.

Christie Hefner

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

Whitney Balliett

I've had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn't a romance - with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader's expectations going into the story, and that's very hard to predict person to person.

Lauren Willig

I get letters from two kinds of readers. History buffs, who love to read history and biography for fun, and then kids who want to be writers but who rarely come out and say so in their letters. You can tell by the questions they ask - How did you get your ?rst book published? How long do you spend on a book? So I guess those are the readers that I'm writing for - kids who enjoy that kind of book, because they're interested in history, in other people's lives, in what has happened in the world. I believe that they're the ones who are going to be the movers and shakers.

Russell Freedman

Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.

Daniel Clowes

Books are just dead words on paper and it is the readers who bring the stories alive. Previously, writers wrote a book and sent it out into the world. A couple of months after publication letters from readers might arrive. And, leaving aside the professional reviews, it is really the reader's opinions that the writer needs. They vote for a book - and a writer - with their hard earned cash every time they go into a bookstore (or online - that's my age showing!) and buy a book.

Michael Scott

Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.

John McGahern

The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.

James Hillman

A Quote by Edward Abbey

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