“To the average person, voices in your head may be worrisome, especially if you answer them out loud, but to a writer, these voices are what direct you to create the most wonderful tales.”

“You have two voices, one that only you hear, and another that you speak out loud with, so others hear you. Regardless of what you actually say with your mouth, what matters is what your inner voice says, for this is the one you listen to the most.”

“Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud...”"...When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head?" "It's certainly not my own", said Harj, and the others chimed in with the same claim."Then whose it?”

“Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”

“THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY is not silent, it is a speaking-out-loud voice in your head; it is *spoken*,a voice is *saying* itas you read. It's the writer's words,of course, in a literary sensehis or her "voice" but the soundof that voice is the sound of *your* voice.Not the sound your friends knowor the sound of a tape played backbut your voicecaught in the dark cathedralof your skull, your voice heardby an internal ear informed by internal abstractsand what you know by feeling,having felt. It is your voicesaying, for example, the word "barn"that the writer wrotebut the "barn" you sayis a barn you know or knew. The voicein your head, speaking as you read,never says anything neutrally- some peoplehated the barn they knew,some people love the barn they knowso you hear the word loadedand a sensory constellationis lit: horse-gnawed stalls,hayloft, black heat tape wrappinga water pipe, a slipperyspilled *chirr* of oats from a split sack,the bony, filthy haunches of cows...And "barn" is only a noun- no verbor subject has entered into the sentence yet!The voice you hear when you read to yourselfis the clearest voice: you speak itspeaking to you. ~~-Thomas Lux”

“If the voices in your head make you cry, you're a lunatic. Put their words on paper, and you're a writer.”