Quotes About Subjectivity

Oh! not handsome—not at all handsome. I thought him very plain at first, but I do not think him so plain now. One does not, you know, after a time.

There is no disputing about taste.

One man's way may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.

What think you of books? said he, smiling. Books—oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings. I

The problem is not in the exterior circumstances but in your own mental attitude toward them, and in the habitual patterns of thought that you have subjectively accepted.

She was learning to treat laws as most people treat poems, making them mean whatever she wanted them to without reference to the author's intention or achievement.

This cigarette tastes like ass, she said. I wasn't sure what ass tasted like, but she looked like she would know, so I was willing to take her word for it.

Solo perchè un poeta dice qualcosa non significa che sia vero, ma solo che suona bene.

Don't be fooled. Charlie remembers things exactly the way he wants to remember them. I suppose we all do...And then we spend the rest of our lives basing the way we think about our families on what we THOUGHT happened--instead of what really did.

Nobody can tell you how the blues feel unless they have the blues. We all take it differently.

Insult is in the ear of the listener. Statements of fact cannot be insulting unless you feel that the label applied indicates some failing, moral or otherwise, in yourself.

Hating a book is not unlike hating a person; in fact it's tempting to just go ahead and hate the author personally, by proxy, qua human being, except that I know that would be a mistake.

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

We are unreliable narrators - all of us.

People always say to me, 'You're really attractive - in an unusual way.' No one ever just says, 'You're attractive.'

I don't want to upset my husband but I don't really like people who are too handsome.

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.

I would describe my work as expressionist. The expressionist point of view is stressing your own feelings about something.

A work of art doesn't have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn't touch you, I have failed.

Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you're my favorite work of art. Is your figure less than Greek, is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart?

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.