Quotes About Interpretation

We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.

Script for an actor is like a bible. You carry it with you, you read it over and over, you go to your passages.

You read a script, and you know if you need to do it.

People do not read first. First and foremost, they see color. Then they see numbers, then shape, and then, if you still have their attention and they understand what you put in front of them, then they will read.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing - not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

I think 'accessible' just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry.

With my pictures, what I hope is that it encourages the reader to imagine more pictures of his own.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

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.

My job is to allow the character to live and breathe - and become as real to the reader as he or she is to me.

I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.

If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It's inevitable.

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.

A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.

You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.

Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.

When you're so close to material, it would be as if you had come out of a bad marriage. You would be so close to it that you would be paying attention to detail that may not mean a whole lot for the reader.