“You are not an observer, you are a participant.”

“Playboy: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?McLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.”

“At times, he even admitted that he'd been more an observer of the world than a participant in it...”

“Books are ALWAYS better than movies! They are ready when you are. You are a participant and not a mere observer. You make the decisions what things look like, or ought to. You are gaining skills reading not just being fed somebody else's interpretation of the story.”

“[David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with "a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into it.”

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”