Quotes About Interpretation

He wanted to get down his reactions to that painting, exactly what he'd noticed and his response to it. You never get a second chance to have a first impression.

fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman's voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia

How the more you looked, the more you gleaned. All the 'ways of seeing' that John Berger wrote about.

But we do not yet have a computer and a program for it that together can interpret speech correctly, without uncertainties, when it is spoken at a normal rate.

Beauty is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.

The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree. (from notes on 'Heraclitean Fire')

Als ik me de wedergeboorte Gods voorstel, dan zie ik die niet in de mens. Het zou in een lam kunnen zijn, maar ik vind een ezel liever.

De toekomst blijft, dunkt mij, aan de figuratieve kunst, zoals ook in de literatuur de toekomst zal blijven aan het samenhangende verhaal met een begin en een einde -liefst met een conventionele interpunctie- en aan het samenhangende gedicht, beide tot stand gebracht in beheerst en bekwaam taalgebruik, en beide hoe geheimzinnig van inhoud ook, aan de oppervlakte een duidelijk herkenbare mededeling bevattend.

Anything can be art. Anthing can be self-expression. Now you take the weapon and run with it.

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

My paintings are wiser than I am.

Fundamentalismus, so könnte man sagen, ist eine religiös versperrte Sicht auf die Welt.

Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement.

No answer is also an answer.

The eyes believe themselves the ears believe other people.

of Shelley's masterpiece was not vague,

The separation of church and state, however interpreted, did not signify the separation of church and society.

[Ezra Pound] was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.

I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will.

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

the dissolution of reality in interpretation is also an (act of) interpretation, which puts the historicity of the interpreter into play, and is not a discovery or a shedding of light onto a past error that would be uncovered on the basis of an objective awareness of the facts.

Jurists, with rare exceptions, are unconsciously and tenaciously averse to clarity and brevity.

The nice thing about jazz is its imperfection….Imcompleteness distinguishes jazz from any other type of music. In classical music, for example, the score contains all the notes to be played. The performer reads it and plays the written notes, nothing less but also nothing more. His performance is all about the many different ways he can interpret those notes, but the notes are always the same. In jazz, the score in just the starting point.