Quotes About Subjectivity

Who's to say what's a good voice and not a good voice?

You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor.

Photography can be a volatile situation. It can be very potent.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.

I have a lot of friends with bad taste in music - some might say that I have bad taste in music.

In every show that you see, there's some stuff that's funny and some stuff that is not, or there might be stuff that you find funny and I don't. That would be true for any show, however funny or popular.

We all do films believing in them completely, but sometimes, the audiences like what we like, and other times, they don't.

There are no true answers, just shades of grey, coincidence, and circumstance.

Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

I asked her why she was getting so upset about such a small thing. She said, 'It doesn't feel small to me.

Are they both special? He cracked up and said, Of course their pop is gonna say they're special. But objectively. What's that? Like, factually. Truthfully. The truth is I'm their pop.

It was not until very much in the posterior that I understanded that each of us was laughing for a different reason, for our own reason, and that not on of those reasons had a thing to do with the potato.

Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.

My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing.

I'm sorry to say that people have written fifty or sixty books about me. I haven't read a single one of them, since I know too much of the subject, and I'm sick and tired of it.

The curious thing about The Ring and the Book, to which I will now return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although there is no difference in what they tell, there is a fundamental difference, which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but the word "murderer" is too general. We know this from reading other books.

Football is aesthetically ugly. Eleven players against eleven others running after a ball are not especially beautiful.

De El Sur, que es acaso mi mejor cuento, básteme prevenir que es posible leerlo como directa narración de hechos novelescos y también de otro modo.

color is the most relative medium in art

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

The observation of others is coloured by our inability to observe ourselves impartially. We can never be impartial about anything until we can be impartial about our own organism.