“…for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.” – Mary Gaitskill

“We as authors sign a pact with our readers; they’ll go on reading because they trust us to play fair with them and deliver what we’ve promised.” – Pamela Glass Kelly

“Primary goal for the author: ‘Write what you mean to say’
“Primary goal for the reader: ‘Read what the author actually writes” – Falcon Dove

“Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it’s only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader’s mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.” – Amy Bloom

“Storytellers think they’re writing for the audience. They’re writing, in a way, to hurt the audience.” – Chuck Wendig