Octavio Paz Quotes

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

Critic's delight: scolding the Mighty Dead.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

Shakespeare is repeated around the world in different languages, just because it's good storytelling.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

What's wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They're so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

Read the writers whose work is still around and has survived the winds of fashion and the attacks of the ignorant and the bigoted - read everything you can get your hands on.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

I don't really read reviews... That's not where my attention goes.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

In a hundred years the historian will understand me better.

Whatever the framers … intended, there is no reason to believe that they possessed the best insights or ultimate wisdom as to the meaning of their words for subsequent generations ... Words do not have fixed meanings.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

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.

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

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.

Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.

You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males.