Multiple Readings Quotes

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

'The Duino Elegies' are notoriously cryptic, and part of the reason why I have always loved them is because they invite multiple readings over the course of a lifetime.

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

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

And then, 'Why is a raven like a writing desk?' Those things just became so important to the character. You realize that the more you read it, if I read the book again today, I'd find 100 other things that I missed last time. It's a constantly changing book.

I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain.

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.

In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

As a rule it usually takes three or four readings for me to be interested in a script, and if I'm interested I'll read it three or four times before I make a strong decision.

A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'

It's very intuitive, the way that I approach my work. I only buy something that has a pulse. I may not know how I'm going to use it, but I know it has a pulse and it has multiple readings - if I shift it one way or another, it can be read this way or it can be read that way, but both readings are critical and very much ground the work.

I get readings, I sometimes get five a week. You'll feel like a schizophrenic by the end of that week. I don't know who I am any more. You'll be in conversation with a friend and start spitting out dialogue.