“If a writer has to find a rhythm if his novel is to come 'right', a rhythm which he may well discover in the rhythm of an individual sentence, then likewise a reader has to find a corresponding rhythm in his reading, which may equally well be discovered in responding to local effect.The intimacy of this relationship between writer and reader is well caught in a recent observation made by Graham Greene, 'Novels should always have, if not dull, then at least level patches. That's where the excessive use of film technique, cutting sharply from intensityto intensity is harmful. . . . The writer needs level passages for his subconscious to work up to the sharp scenes . . . and the reader needs those level patches too, so that he can share in the processes of creation—not by conscious analysis, but by absorption?'To reflect on the wide-ranging effects of rhythmin reading would seem to be one way of making a start on tracing that obscure route that leads from 'absorption' to 'conscious analysis'.”

“What is reading, in the last analysis, but an interchange of thought between writer and reader? If the book enters the reader's mind just as it left the writer's -- without any of the additions and modifications inevitably produced by contact with a new body of thought -- it has been read to no purpose.”

“David Foster Wallace: What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit—to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop…and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.”

“If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.”

“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.”

“A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.”