“A reader’s favorite subject is the reader.”
Derek Thompson • Hit Makers
Saved by Nicola Lombardi and
“A reader’s favorite subject is the reader.”
Quarry’s audience was listening intently. (“The two most interesting things in the world,” Quarry once remarked: “other people’s sex lives and your own money.”)
Robert Harris • The Fear Index
every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is thinking, “I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?”
Stephen King • On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (A Memoir of the Craft (Reissue))
You are not the main character in your story. The reader is.
Nicolas Cole • The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention
There’s always an imaginary other, a “model reader” (to use Umberto Eco’s useful expression) who’s there in the corner of your mind. To write a novel or a poem, they say, you need to have a sense of a reader: your mental picture doesn’t have to be exact or personalized, but no work exists without an imaginary third participant. There’s always you,
... See moreFetishism of famous writers, he suggested, occurs because “it’s such heavy-lifting to actually read books.”