Frederick Wiseman Quotes

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way and not the way one was taught.

It's what the reader thinks that counts.

I love books that give you space to climb inside there. And you have to run to keep up in places, and you have to fill in a lot of blanks yourself. So it almost becomes your story.

My goal is to invite readers to think along with me and draw their own conclusions.

I want my readers to find their own way.

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 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.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

Too many writers of fiction don't give the reader enough credit.

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

People can't just listen to the music and have their own imagination and take them where they wanna go.

I began even as a boy to realize how wide the world can be for a man of free intelligence.

Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon... what it means to you.

I was never ideological in any sense, or a slave to any particular politics or religion. My solace and my inspiration always came from books and literature.

I think, if I'm doing my job correctly, I'm presenting a scenario for you as the reader to engage with on your own. I mean, that's what the best art is supposed to do. It's not supposed to be political. I think if you read all my books, you know where I stand, pretty much.

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

From the moment we are born, people tell us that the world is like this and like that, this way, that way. It is natural that - for a certain period of time - we end up believing what we are told. But we must soon push these ideas aside and discover our own way of living reality.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

I feel really strongly about not wanting to overly guide the reader about what he or she should think. I really trust the reader to know for themselves and not to need too much. You have your own imagination, your own experiences, your own feelings, and a novel wants ultimately to ask questions. It doesn't assert anything, or shouldn't, I think.

An opinion, though it is original, does not necessarily differ from the accepted opinion; the important thing is that it does not try to conform to it.

To see with one's own eyes, to feel and judge without succumbing to the suggestive power of the fashion of the day, to be able to express what one has seen and felt in a snappy sentence or even in a cunningly wrought word - is that not glorious? Is it not a proper subject for congregation?

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

True teaching liberates the student from his teacher.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.