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Michael Seidel, writer 
You’ve been featuring a series of quotes about writing. Here’s one I really like a lot, and I think you will like it also.
Sentences are always literal, no matter how much some writers abhor the idea of being literal. In fact, nothing good can begin to happen in a writer’s education until that sinks in. Your opinion of what your sentence means is always overruled by what your sentence literally says. — Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times, September 24, 2012
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That’s an interesting quote. I’ll take it further: often, what your sentence means and what it literally says is overruled by what the reader thinks it means, and then what the reader says it means. Words and their meanings are simultaneously fungible, concrete, and abstract, you know?
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