Interpretive Reading Quotes

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.

To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.

That's the magic of books. They're never quite the same for any two people. When you read one, you automatically make it your own.

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

And there's wordplay and there's rhythms and you have to be able to get the poetry out of it. You have to be able to sell my jokes. And if you're talking about somebody like Sam Jackson, they do that. Sam Jackson can do that. Sam Jackson can turn it into the spoken word that it was always meant to be and he can sell my jokes. And Christopher Walken can do it and a lot of people can do it, all right.

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.

The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.

In reading we must become creators.

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.