Katherine Dunn Quotes

We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.

Everyone reads the same words in a book but has a very clear picture of their own.

It's always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people. I think people's interactions with art are their own, and will be far more interesting and sophisticated than anything that I could come up with.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

Each of us has a private Austen.

That's the magic of books. They're never quite the same for any two people. When you read one, you automatically make it your own.

All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.

A reader's own imagination is a far more powerful form of CGI than anything any movie can provide because it's unique. In your own imagination, you can enter all sorts of worlds, and they are unique to you because no other reader will interpret a book the same way.

However, no two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is - in other words, not a thing, but a think.

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

One's roused by this, another finds that fit: Each loves the play for what he brings to it.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

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

Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.

People get out of music what they want to get out of it, and all I try to do is do the same thing.

Because the life that I live - the life that we all live - is filtered through [one's own] experience. It isn't necessarily optimistic when you look at the political phenomena, the different things that are going on in the world.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.

Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

The good thing about movies is that they're subjective. You can connect to different themes depending on your own perspective.