Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

I'm a pluralist about perspectives on literature. There seem to me to be all sorts of illuminating ways of responding to major literary works, some of them paying considerable attention to context, others applying various theoretical ideas, yet others focusing on details of language, or linking the work to the author's life, or connecting it with other works.

Books always speak of other books.

To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

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

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.

I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

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

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'

I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing.

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

The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence.