I agree with that statement. Alot of the time an author's meaning is over-interpreted and in turn, distorted. In my own case, quite a few papers I wrote for AP Literature/Composition were over-interpreted, causing the original meaning to be lost. I posed that same question to several English teachers, all of which couldn't answer me: "How does one know that that is the true meaning of a work if the author himself (herself) didn't say so?"