The written word is everything.
People are always saying it's the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it's a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it's a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
When television gets in trouble is when it forgets that it all begins with the written word.
I've always found it easy and natural and, more importantly, necessary to articulate thoughts and feelings, and fierce emotions, through the written word. Fantasy and horror came to me when I was very young.
While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.
So no one should rely on television either for their knowledge of music or for news. There's just more going on. It's an adjunct to the written word, which I think is still the most important thing.
No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
I had learning disabilities, and I couldn't express myself in the written word.
I love to draw and paint. I'm very active in that way, but I'm not very good with the written word, though.
