A Quote by James Joyce

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

James Joyce

Quote Topics

Demand Devote His Life Make Reader Reading Should Whole Whole Life Works

Quote Author

James Joyce
Irish - Novelist
February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

Nathalie Sarraute

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

Ben Okri

Complex literary works demand an effort from the reader that is becoming harder to justify, given the sink-or-swim pressures to make profitable products for a global marketplace.

Joanna Scott

Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.

Randall Jarrell

If a reader likes a particular author, they keep reading all his books, and if the supply is not kept up, then the reader shifts his loyalties.

Ravi Subramanian

If you see in all my books, I have two key intentions. One is obviously to entertain and make sure that the reader has a good reading experience. I also try to write on subjects that nobody has dealt with before to make my works different from other page turners.

Ravi Subramanian

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

Marcel Proust

I'm not a big crime reader, but I'm reading Michael Connelly's 'The Reversal.' I'm going back to his novels. I'm also reading Keith Richards' 'Life.' I'm always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late '60s and early '70s and the youth culture becoming an industry.

Jo Nesbo

Deep down in the Christian's life, always and all the time, there is to be a "no" to every demand that the flesh may make for recognition, and every demand that the flesh may make for approval, and every demand that the flesh may make for vindication. Always the Christian must bear about in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus.

Alan Redpath

An acquaintanceship with the literature of the world may be won by any person who will devote half an hour a day to the careful reading of the best books. The habit of reading good books is one that gives great comfort in all the stages and among all the vicissitudes of life. The man who has learned to love good reading is never alone. His friends are the great ones of human history, and to them he may always go for stimulating and helpful communion. -GQ 71

John Andreas Widtsoe

Only for today, I will devote ten minutes of my time to some good reading, remembering that just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul

Pope John XXII

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

Alan Lightman

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

Jorge Luis Borges

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

Robert Graves

It sounds to me like the OLED iPhone is a phone which Apple can't make 40 million of per quarter, at least not today. And if that's true, that means it should be more expensive. Not 'should' in any moral sense, but simply because that's how the principle of supply and demand works.