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" A book may outlive its author, and it moves too, and it too can be said to change - but not in the manner of the telling. It changes in the manner of the reading. As many commentators have remarked, works of literature are recreated by each generation of readers, who make them new by finding fresh meanings in them. The printed text of a book is thus like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes music when played by musicians, or "interpreted" by them, as we say. The act of reading a text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes its own interpreter. "
― Margaret Atwood , Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
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" I was holding forth about this a while ago at a dinner for a bunch of writers. 'Gilgamesh was the first writer,' I said. 'He wants the secret of life and death, he goes through hell, he comes back, but he hasn't got immortality, all he's got is two stories — the one about his trip, and the other, extra one about the flood. So the only thing he really brings back with him is a couple of stories.
Then he's really, really tired, and then he writes the whole thing down on a stone.'
'Yeah, that's what it is,' said the writers. 'You go, you get the story, you're whacked out, you come back and write it all down on a stone. Or it feels like a stone by the sixth draft,' they added.
'Go where?' I said.
'To where the story is,' they said.
Where is the story? The story is in the dark. That is why inspiration is thought of as coming in flashes. Going into a narrative — into the narrative process - is a dark road. You can't see your way ahead. Poets know this too; they too travel the dark roads. The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards. "
― Margaret Atwood , Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
