Books are designed to keep you reading the next thing until the end, but hypertext invites choice. Writing hypertext, you've got to accept the possibility your reader will just stop reading. Why not? The choice to go do something else might me the best out come of a text. Who wants a numb reader/reader-by-numbers anyway? Go write your own text. Go paint a mural. You must change your life. I want piratical readers, plagiarists and opportunists, who take what they want from my ideas and knot it into their own arguments. Or even their own novels. From which, possibly, I'll steal it back. ~ Shelley Jackson ~
A conventional novel is a safe ride. It is designed to catch you up, propel you down its track, and pop you out at the other end with possibly a few new catchphrases in your pocket and a pleasant though vague sense of the scenery rushing by. The mechanism of the chute is so effective, in fact, that it undoes the most worthy experiments; sentences that ought to stop you in your tracks are like spider webs across the chute. You rip through, they're gone. ~ Shelley Jackson ~		But in this place without coordinates I cautiously began to imagine that I could invent a new game, make a novel, if we still want to call it that, shaped a little more like my own thoughts. ~ Shelley Jackson ~
Indeed, the very proliferation of books and other print-based media, so prevalent in this forest-harvesting, paper wasting age, is held to be a sign of its feverish moribundity, the last futile gasp of a once vital form before it finally passes away forever, dead as God ... the novel, too, as we know it, has come to its end. ~ Robert Coover ~		Much of the novel's alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last … [b]ut true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text. ~ Robert Coover ~
Indeed the creative imagination often becomes more preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or style, or with what we would call character or plot (two traditional narrative elements that are decidedly in jeopardy). ~ Robert Coover ~