Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

I think other people's interpretations of what I've written are a lot better than what I have, because I don't understand a lot of what I write.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can.

I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there.

Facts do not speak.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

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.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

Because [scientific] researchers employ so much nuance and strive to disclose all remaining sources of uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly susceptible to selective reading and misinterpretation. Giving ideologues or partisans scientific data that is relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated reasoning equivalent of a candy store.

People are going to assume whatever they want to assume.

We take literature too seriously.

I do wish that reviews were less like book reports. There was an era when reviewers had something to say about a book: when they painted context and drew conclusions. Many reviews these days are little more than plot summary.

I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we're getting into tricky territory.

Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.

I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.

No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.