Michael Morpurgo Quotes

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.

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

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

They were like English teachers who took the fun out of a perfectly good book by breaking it down into themes and sentence structures

Literature is analysis after the event.

There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view.

Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.

The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.

People need meanings to everything. People want you to intellectualize every choice you make.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.

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.

I've always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

You sit there, and you argue and you argue, and you sort of bully the hell out of the text until you're quite sure what it's revealing, and then you perform it.

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'

I'm big on watching film, and sometimes it hurts myself because I over-calculate things, or I overthink sometimes.

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.

Good readers make much out of little.

[T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it.

I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.

I'm the kind of person that wants to analyze and I think having a background in, strangely enough, in like literature and languages, I'm always analyzing things.

The more you read the novella, the more you should wonder, I think, which judgments are to be taken as bedrock.