Textual Interpretation Quotes

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.

I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.

When I write and develop things myself, I might work for a while on a script from a book, and then I go back and read the book and go back into it to see if I lost something: is there something there?

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.

I would say that deconstruction is affirmation rather than questioning, in a sense which is not positive: I would distinguish between the positive, or positions, and affirmations. I think that deconstruction is affirmative rather than questioning: this affirmation goes through some radical questioning, but it is not questioning in the field of analysis.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

Exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis!

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel.

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience.

a good reader makes a good book

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.

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

When you're at drama school you spend so much time working on amazing texts and analyzing them, digging into them, and figuring out why it happens, why you are being asked to say what you're saying, and what the words mean. But then when you start working, most of the stuff would just fall apart if you subject it to that kind of scrutiny.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.