Michel de Montaigne Quotes

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

The meaning ... of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.

There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.

I personally have a great deal of respect for readers. I have a great deal of respect for the human race. I think most people can tell the difference between fiction and fact. I think that the action of writing about something does not condone it. The best thing I can ever hope to do is provide good questions, and I think I do that. I hope I do.

There is no right or wrong reading of Naked Lunch, though some readings are more common, and thus Burroughs commercial is not the issue.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

A man’s mind is hidden in his writings: criticism brings it to light.