Quotes About Subjectivity

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

You really believe that there are subjects that shouldn't be photographed?' George said. He spoke evenly and softly. 'Maybe I do,' I said, thinking aloud. 'You believe in censorship then,' said Stephen. I looked up at Stephen. His face was tight, combative. 'Not censorship,' I said slowly. 'That's external. I mean control from the inside. After all, pictures can lie, too, can convey falseness rather than truth.

Without a viewer, a reader, a listener, art is dead. Something happens between me and it, an "it" that carries in itself another person's willed act, a thing suffused with another person's subjectivity, and in it I may feel pain, humor, sexual desire, discomfort. And that is why I don't treat artworks as I would treat a chair, but I don't treat them as a real person either.

It's all about people. It's all about the subjectivity of what people love.

I love Daredevil. I thought it was enjoyable. Okay? There were critical issues with it, and that's why I wear black, some people wear red - we are entitled to our opinions.

It's no secret that I didn't love 'An Officer And A Gentleman' then, and I certainly don't love it now, so at least no one could accuse me of being inconsistent.

To try to explain something as "I love it" and "It's fun" would be like describing the sunset over the middle of the ocean as "bright and pretty." It's just not that simple.

The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

... does it seem to you that it is possible to speak of Art? It would be the same as explaining love!

To be a fashion critic is easy because you just say, 'I love it, I hate it,' but life is more than love and hate.

The observer is the observed.

You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.

I guess it's always uncomfortable to discover you're not as individual as you thought. But it really bothered me. From one perspective, I was an independent animal, exercising free will in order to elicit predictable reactions from an inert vending machine. But from another, the vending machine was choosing to withhold snacks in order to extract predictable, mechanical reactions from young men. I couldn't figure out any objective reason to consider one scenario more likely than the other.

She was one of the people who say, I don't know anything about music really, but I know what I like. - Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts.

People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts." Her lips soured. "Maybe that's my problem too.

My paintings are not meant to be tasted.

Ich bin auf Erfahrungen angewiesen, die ich nicht begrifflich fassen kann, die mich hilflos machen und von daher narrativ.

And I'm going to tell the truth: I didn't like that Sean Penn movie Into the Wild so much. Yes! I know it was critically acclaimed. I know it won all these awards! It's very sad that a boy is dead and all. But I thought the movie Enchanted, with the singing princess and the chipmunk and the people dancing in Central Park, was cuter. So there!

Art." Dauntra nodded. "Sure. I can't believe a guy gets paid to show off his goods, and people call it art.

The tendency in many parts of medicine is, if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist, or the patient is cuckoo.

He didn't remember because he'd seen thousands of little fish hundreds of times, and because it didn't mean to him what it had to me.

The flâneur traverses an economic space where wares are sold – poetry, journalism, knowledge – in the marketplace. If this is acknowledged then the flâneur's subjectivity is allied with others who sell themselves (albeit existing in competition with them), rather than with all men. He is subservient to the market.