“Do not let a book get you in a reading slump”

“How, then, does the written word work? What part of a reader absorbs it - or should that be a double question: what part of a reader absorbs what part of a text? I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text, whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.”

“The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ’s so I’m constantly aware of, and respect that. I have a tendency to give my readers vivid descriptions of panoramic viewpoints, soft breezes, and the late evening as it scrapes against the emerging night and present this step by suspenseful step. Once I get them to the threshold of that unseen cliff, I shove them off and say, take it from there.”

“The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.”

“Readers are often fans of Authors, but I, myself, am a fan of readers. They are the ones who breathe life into the pages that we give birth to, after all.”

“However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven't yet grasped. That is why - as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again - no reading can ever be definitive.”

“I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.”

“The last chapter in 'Alice in Worcestershire' is called 'Writing the book'.I started to write that 'Diary' chapter at the very beginning of the process and followed it through to the end... speaking to the reader.My decision to do this was because I've often read autobiographies and wondered how the author felt and how it impacted them writing about painful memories that had been locked away in a deep forgotten place.I wanted to know what was going in their 'present' life while they were writing; about the struggle with sharing their inner secrets and... I'm... inquisitive. (nosy)!It took me over five years to finish 'Alice in Worcestershire' because sometimes, I was simply too drained to continue. Periodically, I updated the 'Diary' chapter and, thankfully, it's enthusiastically appreciated by readers.”

“Not all readers become leaders, but all leaders must be readers.”

“What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.”

“[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.”