Quotes About Interpretation

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

Who is the ideal reader? God only knows.

The newspaper fits the reader's program while the listener must fit the broadcaster's program.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others.

I don't think anyone wants a reader to be completely lost - certainly not to the point of giving up - but there's something to be said for a book that isn't instantly disposable, that rewards a second reading.

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

The ideal, it seems to me, is to show things happening and allow the reader to decide what they mean.

The Bible - it's sort of the other person in the room. There's this book, the reader, and the Bible.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

Each reader has to find her or his own message within a book.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

I'm not really a good reader. What I mean is, I think I'm not one of those people who can read a story and analyze it just like that.