Quotes About Interpretation

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average reality perceived by the communal eye.

the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–-

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

When I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool

Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.

Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.

realidade (uma das poucas palavras que só fazem sentido entre aspas)

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

But they are practically brother and sister, ejaculated Marina, thinking as many stupid people do that practically works both ways - reducing the truth of a statement and making a truism sound like the truth.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. Line

It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.

The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull." Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.

What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word deified? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi?

Sana anlat?lan?n asl?nda üç aÅŸamal? olduÄŸunu unutma; önce anlatan taraf?ndan biçimlendiÄŸini, sonra dinleyen taraf?ndan yeniden biçimlendiÄŸini, öyküdeki ölmüÅŸ adam?n her ikisinden de saklad??? ÅŸeyler olduÄŸunu.

An author's fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained?