13 August 2007

Quotable

This is from Jasper Fforde's "First Among Sequels." For the bibliophiles out there, Word Nerd thought it was worth passing on.

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work -- the writer might have died long ago.

2 comments:

Page Smith said...

Nah. It's much harder to write it than to read it.

Anonymous said...

I think Fforde was making the point that when we read something like "dying rays of the sun" we bring our real life. experiences to bear on the prose, unlike in his BookWorld, the fictional characters who really don't know what that means.