Language is the ordinary medium of daily communication – unlike music or paint

Prose is always simple in this sense, because language is the ordinary medium of daily communication – unlike music or paint. Our ordinary possessions are being borrowed by even very difficult writers: the millionaires of style – difficult lavish stylists like Sir Thomas Browne, Melville, Ruskin, Lawrence, James, Woolf – are very prosperous, but they use the same banknotes as everyone else

J. Wood, How fiction works (10th Anniversary edition. 2019), 157-8

They have not read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it

You only have to teach literature to realise that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful. We grow as readers, and twenty-year-olds are relative virgins. They have not read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it.

J. Wood, How fiction works (10th Anniversary edition. 2019), 62