Reading, writing

“The real writers are the ones who can’t not write. I’m a reader who can’t not read. I got to be that way in about third grade. I wrote a lot of stories and poems in college, but now that grades aren’t at stake, I’ve written exactly two poems in the last 40+ years. I can’t, however, count the number of books I’ve read — now about equally divided between published ones and unpublished. And I feel I’ve hardly made a dent in all I want to read.”

– Shannon Ravenel, editor at Algonquin (publishers) in an interview with Toby Warner of Boldtype.