Frederick Orin Bartlett: When I read a good story by some one else, I do not read it—I live it. When I see things with my eyes shut I see them as distinctly as when my eyes are open. In both cases they are sometimes distinct and sometimes blurred, depending a good deal upon my interest. A feature of my own particular way of thinking which has always interested me is my ability in a story to recall vividly a great many details of scenes I thought I had forgotten. In other words my subjective memory is more reliable and of better capacity than my objective memory.
I don't remember anything at all about my troubles with solid geometry. I have a notion they were just average.
I respond to an author with all he gives me and all I have myself.
I recognize considerable variation in the architecture of my village churches but my cowboys are a good deal alike.
I resent nothing an author may do except to be dull.
When I write I leave out a great deal more than I do when I read.
I do not consciously use any tools when I write. I depend upon a sense of form partly instinctive and partly cultivated—that and the emotions.
Nalbro Bartley: I seldom read fiction because I always see the machinery of it (or think I do). But when I read history, I let my imagination vividly picture every incident and struggle. I often feel the actual pain or mental suffering described.
I see mental pictures in their actual colors—with very clear-cut details.
Solid geometry and trigonometry both helped me as a fiction writer—I was hopeless with algebra or arithmetic. I can't explain the former unless it was a sort of mathematical phantasy—anyway, it taught me to construct. I never have "stock pictures" for scenes—each one has some minute difference as the case may warrant.