I think voice is the music of the story's intelligence, that the voice of a novel, the voice of a story, is not the speaking voice of Frank Bascombe but it is something a good bit more complex. It is how a novel sounds when it is doing its most important business on you, when it is, as novels do, as poems do. Novels lean on us. They are artifice. They are rhetorical. They are trying to affect us and change us. And that's what I hear, what I understand, when I use the word “voice.”

RICHARD FORD