You cannot sustain a life of writing without a life of reading. 

Writing in a 2002 book called, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Margaret Atwood, famed writer of the Handmaid’s Tale, writes of how writing and reading are intertwined. Far more acquainted with the likes of Odysseus and Ovid than most of are, she characterizes it as engaging the dead. Those of us writing in the academic newsroom are as likely to see who we read at a conference, if only at a distance. Atwood writes:

All writers learn from the dead. As long as you continue to explore the work of writers who have preceded you; you also feel judged and held to account by them. (p. 178)

What does she mean by the last part? “You also feel judged and held to account by them?” When you’ve been in the business awhile, when you read and reread what someone in your field of study has written over time, whether you feel affinity with it or couldn’t disagree with it more, as you are writing, you hear their voices. You know them well enough to know what they would be thinking about what you’ve just written. To be more accurate, if you know them largely through their writing, you know what they were thinking the last time you held a conversation with them by reading something they’d written. Like a breeze across a pond, their thoughts have had a ripple effect on the evolution of your thinking

No long a scholar, the person who ceases reading the works of others in his or her field of study.