When people are reading a book, it's a personal thing. They're reading it; it's in their own mind; it's in their own personal space when they're reading it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It's not my business whether people like or dislike it.
Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own.
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
I know I'm old-fashioned, but there's just something about the act of looking at books versus taking in information on a screen, which is so one-dimensional. There's a sense of ownership that you have with books, a physical connection.
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.
This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.
Books are mind reading devices; they allow us free access to the thoughts and dreams of people we have never met.