Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry but obviously like everybody I have a set of criteria for reading poems and I'm not shy about presenting them so if people ask for my critical response to a poem I tell them what works and why and what doesn't work and why.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry as such.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world then it has had its desired effect.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting unstable and interactive.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

No poem is easily grasped so why should any reader expect fast results?

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance.

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

I think movies do play a valuable role in turning people on to the act of reading. I think that phenomenon just creates readers. At first they're going to love 'Harry Potter ' or they may love 'The Hunger Games ' but after that they're going to love the act of reading and wonder 'What else can I read?'

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture including TV magazines movies and video games.

I trust that your readers will not construe my words to mean that I would not have gone to a 3 o'clock in the morning session for the sake of defeating the Nebraska bill.

I know there are a lot of readers that think I've got a very crappy marriage just because of the things going on with Rick and Lori but there's really nothing that's been like a mirror. I'm just making this stuff up.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius who are often too full to be exact and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

Today a reader tomorrow a leader.

The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.

Readership was high and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world.

As writers become more numerous it is natural for readers to become more indolent whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

Millions of dollars' worth of advertising shows such little respect for the reader's intelligence that it amounts almost to outright insult.

It's part of a writer's profession as it's part of a spy's profession to prey on the community to which he's attached to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.