Philip Kitcher Quotes

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

Knowing about authors' beliefs helps you understand how those beliefs influence their writing, and things you thought meant one thing, once you've got enough information about that writer, you suddenly realize mean an entirely different thing. That makes a difference.

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.)

I don't fall into the physical manifestation of a man of letters. So I guess people assume the scripts are delivered to me under the door.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do. When I tell the story of Cinderella, the sprite does not want me to make it into an allegory of the fall of communism. The sprite would be unhappy if I did that.

I can't read my poem "Distracted by an Ergonomic Bicycle" without thinking of Seattle, where the events of the poem took place, and I can't read "In Defense of the Semicolon" without thinking of Toronto - but why should that matter to anyone else? If another reader imagines "In Defense of the Semicolon" taking place in New Orleans, great.

Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read.

Each of my book arrives at a form and a style that is appropriate to the subject.

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

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.

Part of my methodological approach is made explicit when I discuss ways in which literature can have philosophical significance. Literature doesn't typically argue - and when it does, it's deadly dull. But literature can supply the frame within which we come to observe and reason, or it can change our frame in highly significant ways. That's one of the achievements I'd claim for Mann, and for Death in Venice.

I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."

I don't think readers of Mann have overlooked the fact that he was a great ironist, but they have tended to see the irony in particular parts of the novella, and to miss it in others.

Some readers and commentators really want to scrape your insides out to make sense of your work. Others say, there's the work, it speaks for itself. Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle.

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative.

Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk