The Inventive Misread

“To be misread in anyway that bears thinking about, however, a writer has to be read as well. But those misreadings, conferred by skillful, cultivated, highly imaginative, widely read misreaders can be instructive, even when quite bizarre – witness Lawrence on American literature; or Freud, the all-time most influential misreader if imaginative literature. So are those misreaders the censors influential, though for other reasons. And are the Soviet censors necessarily misreading, in Solzhenitzyn's fiction, his political aims? Though censors may appear to be the most narrow-minded and perverse of all misreaders, at times they may be more discerning about the socially injurious implications of a book then the most tolerantly open-minded audience” (id, 151).

#110

“It occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters” (id, 145).

#109

“Actually I think of pornography more as the projection of an altogether human preoccupation with the genitalia in and of themselves – a preoccupation excluding all emotions other than those elemental feelings that the contemplation of genital functions arouses” (Roth, 2007: 6).

ROTH, Philip (2007). Reading Myself And Others. London: Vintage.