Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.

I think two different people can read one of my books and come away with completely different opinions on the subject. I hope they just read from the beginning to the end and be made to think about the subject. Then they can come to their own conclusions.

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

The whole point of reading is that the writer is speaking to you, and if you're not listening, you're not going to have any fun reading.

It's not my job to tell people what a work means.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

A book is not completed till it's read.

You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.

A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes...I see.

Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.

I really think it's important that my beliefs don't impinge upon what you get from the movie. It's your opinion that matters and it's far more interesting than mine.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.