“The aim of the scholarly editor is not to produce the the easiest text for the reader, but to get as near as he can to the text of the author.”

“You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi vi vi is the text editor of the beast.”

“Every text assumes a reader.”

“A translator has divided loyalties. He has a duty to his author, a duty to his reader and a duty to the text. The three are by no means identical and are often hard to reconcile.”

“Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.”

“Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there — which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.”

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

“The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”

“Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source — the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.”

“Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text.”