Quotes About Interpretation

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

A writer loses possession of her work as soon as it's reaches its audience. Each reader brings his own experience and prejudice and imagination to the work. Television adaptation just goes one step further, and the novelist has to learn to let go.

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

I think of myself as the eyes and ears and voice of the reader.

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.

Words build a bridge between the imaginations of writer and reader, creating something unique between them.

An ideal reader is someone who doesn't know what on Earth you've been doing, who will look at it with absolute freshness and go, 'Oh, so that's what you've been up to.'

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

Numbers of sales do not correspond to numbers of readers.

For me it's more important that I outline all the facets of a controversial issue and let the reader make up his or her mind. I don't care if readers change their minds, but I would like readers to ask themselves why their opinion is what it is.

As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.

Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.

I know there are a lot of readers that think I've got a very crappy marriage just because of the things going on with Rick and Lori but there's really nothing that's been like a mirror. I'm just making this stuff up.

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

There are readers who want every point to be clearly and unambiguously set forth, and there are those who want to pry ideas and meanings out for themselves.