Philip Kitcher Quotes

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

If we took Chaucer's writings at face value, we'd have to conclude he was a complete drip.

I try to avoid describing one interpretation of my books. Of course I have an opinion. I have things I want to say, but I don't ever want to limit anybody, to have them say, 'Oh, he said this, so that's what it's about.' I'm happy people bring their own stuff to it.

There are readers who want every point to be clearly and unambiguously set forth, and there are those who want to pry ideas and meanings out for themselves.

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

I believe the structure of 'House of Leaves' is far more difficult to explain than it is to read. And while I'd like to lay claim to some extraordinary act of originality, truth is I'm only taking advantage of capabilities inherent in everyone.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.

An able reader often discovers in other people's writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

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.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.

I couldn't possibly tell you. But I would say be very careful with your suppositions. People are so quick to jump. That's what I love about playing the character. People are so quick to draw conclusions about who he is. The whole thing about Loki is that he's dancing on this liminal line between redemption and destruction. Just be very careful about drawing conclusions based on what you see.

Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.

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

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!

When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.

It's just funny that anybody would care at all to take apart the words that I write. It's kind of cool!

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

Please do not understand me too quickly.