“The aim of the scholarly editor is not to produce the the easiest text for the reader, but to get as near as he can to the text of the author.”

“You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi vi vi is the text editor of the beast.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

“Every text assumes a reader.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

“A translator has divided loyalties. He has a duty to his author, a duty to his reader and a duty to the text. The three are by no means identical and are often hard to reconcile.”

David Hawkes (sinologist) (1923–2009) British sinologist

“Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

“Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there — which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

“The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

“Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source — the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

“Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text.”

Abraham Pais (1918–2000) American Physicist