The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
Imagination tends to be truly useful if accompanied by the power of mental control - if the worlds in one's head can be purposefully manipulated and distinguished from the real one outside it.
Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own.
I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves.