The writer as reader
January 31, 2009
A writer is, first and last, a reader. Who do you write for? Gertrude Stein was asked, and famously replied, “Myself and strangers.” That self, the reader-self who is allied with strangers, may be a writer’s better half, more detached, more trustworthy, than the writing self who swaggers through a lifetime of prose. It is difficult—and diminishing—to separate the self who writes from the one who reads. Both acts belong to the communion of the word, which is a writer’s life.
Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
