A Quote by Mary Roach

I write with a sense of my future readers being ever on the verge of setting down the book and pronouncing it a bore. Fear and insecurity are great motivators.

Mary Roach

Quote Topics

Being Book Bore Down Ever Fear Future Great Insecurity My Future Readers Sense Setting Verge Write

Quote Author

Mary Roach
American - Author
Born: March 20, 1959

I definitely feel like when I write a book it's not my job to police or guide the readers. The book and the characters don't belong to me anymore. If that makes sense.

Danzy Senna

When I write, I have a sort of secret kinship of readers in all countries who don't know each other but each of whom, when they read my book, feels at home in it. So I write for those readers. It's almost a sense of writing for a specific person, but it's a specific person who I don't know.

Teju Cole

Fear and anxiety are great motivators for me.

David Nicholls

Most men are very attached to the idea of being male, and usually experience a lot of fear and insecurity around the idea of being a man. Most women are very identified with their gender, and also experience a tremendous amount of fear and insecurity.

Andrew Cohen

Exercise your imagination muscle! How many uses can you come up with for a flowerpot? Write down your answers. But don't write them in this book. Grab a separate sheet of paper. I didn't spend two and a half weeks writing a book just so you could mark up the pages with your silly ideas for things you can do with a flowerpot. When it comes down to it, what's wrong with a flowerpot not being a flowerpot? Why is nothing ever good enough for you?

Amy Sedaris

The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.

Robert Graves

Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.

Rita Dove

Some readers sort of suspect that you have another book that you didn't publish that has even more information in it. I think that readers sort of want to be taught something. They have this idea that there's a takeaway from a novel rather than just the being there, which I think is the great, great pleasure of reading.

Alice McDermott

I do not mean to say that such institutions act unilaterally on psychic life, or that they determine certain psychic outcomes. Rather, they exploit forms of fear and insecurity that are there for any population - no political organisation of life could ever fully do away with fear and insecurity; but some work to intensify, accelerate, and make more acute forms of fear, and to provide ideological focus for such intensified fears, at which point critical thinking has a fierce rival. The critical analysis that shows precisely how those forms of fear are promulgated, and for what purpose.

Judith Butler

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

I knew that a zombie book would not particularly appeal to some of my previous readers, but it was artistically compelling, and being able to do a short nonfiction book about poker was really fun and great.

Colson Whitehead

I write a book a year while creating TV and film projects. And being a writer isn't just writing: I have to chase down paychecks and manage foreign tax payments. I maintain a vibrant relationship with readers and bloggers. And when it comes to Hollywood, I typically have to have fifteen business meetings in the hopes that one leads to a project.

Taylor Jenkins Reid

No murder or sin or act of barbarism or cruelty has ever been committed by a person fully absorbed in the reading of a book. By this fact alone, we can conclude that readers are nicer people, at least until they put the book down. When we are reading, we are better.

Anthony McCarten

I cannot just write a frivolous book, a la-di-da book. Everything isn't la-di-da. There is something that's going to pull you up short. I want to reassure young readers. I want to comfort them, to not fear the unexpected.

Sharon Creech

As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot: pride, showmanship, the pursuit of power, self-aggrandizement, revenge, making money. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that, but I dislike closing a book with the sense that I've been had.