“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”

“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?”

“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.”

“You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that’s going to happen is if you actually do it. People can’t read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page.So you have to do it, goddamnit.”

“The more you read,the more you know.The more you know,the smarter you grow.The smarter you grow, the stronger your voice, when speaking your mind or making your choice.”

“What is it about your voice thatmakes me want to hear you speak?”

“Hear me now or regret it later: Everything you write must be read aloud. Once all the context items are in place, this is the final test for any written piece...Do not neglect your sense of hearing in the process of writing and reading. As a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, I can tell you on good authority that you have been listening to the English language at least five or six years longer than you have been writing and reading. And, most probably, your ears also had eighteen or more years of familiarity with the language before you began to read or write with a writer's sensibility. For these reasons, your ears know when things sound okay, good, beautiful, strange, awkward, or just plain bad, before your eye can pick up on such things...Your written voice should burn with the fire of fervent prayer, soothe like a friend's voice during a late-night phone call, alure like a lover's whisper. You must, through your accessible, infinitely read-aloudable voice, make your audience into an insatiable reader of your words.”