Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

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.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

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

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

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

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.

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.

In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.

...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.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

What on earth is modern exegesis up to? Oh, little lazy one! Some red wine and up! Off you go, brandishing your fork, stripped of Ophelia's useless ornaments, fire in your large nostrils, out to rake the muck of metaphors.

There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant, and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment.

We take literature too seriously.

I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses.

Reader look, not on his picture but his book.

The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. but what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.

There is nothing outside the text

The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.

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 . . .

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.