David Foster Wallace Quotes

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

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.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think.

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.

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.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

The writer after all is only half the book, the other half is the reader.

Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.

Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

I can't control what a reader takes from a story.

I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.

I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

I don't want to hear at all what the artist thinks about his art. And I'm not writing for the artist. I'm writing for the reader, and I want to tell the reader what I think.

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.