If you haven’t read you don’t have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

Saunders is stressing reading as the primary way a writer (or any speaker) acquires a usable “voice”—not merely a style, but a repertoire of rhythms, structures, and moral/psychological nuance absorbed from other minds. Without sustained reading, one’s expressive range can remain thin, making it harder to render complex experience or to recognize what experience can look like on the page. The second sentence pushes the claim further: if you cannot articulate or shape what happens to you (or what you imagine), you effectively lose access to it as “experience” in a meaningful, communicable sense. In this view, reading enlarges perception by enlarging language, and language in turn deepens lived reality.