Quotes About Subjectivity

Irving Berlin said, "Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it." That doesn't mean it's good or bad—that's the equivalent of arguing the merits of hotdogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

Our native susceptibilities and acquired tastes determine which of the many qualities in an object shall most impress us, and be most clearly recalled. One man remembers the combustible properties of a substance, which to another is memorable for its polarising property; to one man a stream is so much water-power, to another a rendezvous for lovers.

What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.

Destroy the undefinable subjective component, and the whole cosmic process, like the process of time-keeping, becomes meaningless-indeed unimaginable.

Despite the elimination of subjectivity from the mechanical world picture, the desire for perfection, the need to defy and circumvent fate, the impulse to transcendence, can be observed in technology, too, along with other manifestations common to religion, like the readiness to accept sacrifice and premature death.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.

It's useless to try and make rhyme or reason of it, because one guy thinks one thing and the other guy sees a whole other thing. So I try not to take them too seriously. Lately I have them screened so I only read the positive ones.

Writing books can be very individual - one might strike you as helpful that someone else found useless, or that you might not have appreciated at some other time in your life.

'I' is the word everyone uses to refer to themselves. On the one hand, it points to a specific person, but it's also this blank space that you can insert yourself into; it's a chute into empathy.

The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.

In third grade, I had to an oral report on the state of Oregon. I brought up Big Foot sightings, and I remember there was an argument about whether or not Big Foot was valid history. Ever since then I've been thinking about how subjective history is.

In my own experience with films, books, plays, TV, I don't want somebody telling me what it means, because I think I know, and I want my interpretation to be valid, because it is valid.

The idea that everyone's opinion is valuable is sometimes up for question.

You hear different things from different people, and they're all valid: they're all valuable. I think that's what comprises a performance is all those ideas.

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.

The value of art is in the observer.

You'll be someone's favourite, and someone else is going to hate you, aren't they? I know that I can't please everyone, but what I can do is be myself and be true to my values.

Don't be fooled. Charlie remembers things 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.

Your "imperfection" might be another's fetish.

To each our own Hamlet.