book interpretation Quotes

Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point.

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

Sometimes you don't know what a book is about until you are finished with it and you're talking about it.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.

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 Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine - but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.

The book is the book and it will always be there. It's a quiet ending. In the book it's a contemplative ending which I think you could certainly do that in a movie.

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

I'm not one of those people that goes into the movies that are based off of books going, 'I know what this is really about.' I want to go and have a good time.

I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn't learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God's injunction and Adam's loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. Hurry, they say, he'll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

Adverbs is a book about love, and I thought that was pretty cheerful, but people who are reading it now are telling me that it's actually quite dark.

'First Light' has gotten a reputation as a kind of cult classic about science. I never really intended it to be read as a science book, but books, like children, have a way of choosing their own friends.