Quotes About Interpretation

En el caso del arte, siempre nos encontramos ya, en realidad, en una tensión entre la pura aspectualidad (Aspekthaftigkeit) de la visión y del Anbild, según lo he llamado, y el significado que adivinamos en la obra de arte y que reconocemos por la importancia que cada encuentro semejante con el arte tiene para nosotros. ¿En qué se basa este significado? ¿Qué es ese plus que se añade, y sólo por el cual llega la obra de arte a ser lo que es?

Con seguridad, la esencia de una gran obra de arte no ha consistido nunca en procurarle a la «naturaleza» una reproducción plena y fiel, un retrato.

La significatividad inherente a lo bello del arte, de la obra de arte, remite a algo que no está de modo inmediato en la visión comprensible como tal.

Arte es algo cuyo «uso», en vez de ser un verdadero utilizar, se cumple de modo peculiar en un demorarse contemplativo en la apariencia.

No characters in 'Stay Close ' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer.

I hate when a director says to me 'Here's how I envision this scene'...excuse me? It's right here in the script - I 'envisioned' it FOR you. Do what I wrote. If you want to 'envision', you should become a writer. Where the fuck were you when the page was blank?

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

[Poems] are necessarily about other poems; a poem is a response to a poem, as a poet is a response to a poet, or a person to his parent.

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.

As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical.

My mother's eyes were incomprehensible; they were dark stages where dimly seen mob scenes were staged and all one ever sensed was tumult and drama, and no matter how long one waited, the lights never went up and the scene never was explained.

A story is like a feather blowed around by the wind. Some folks see that feather and say, "Oh, there's a feather," that's all. One day a man pick that feather up and weave it into his gbo, the thing that protect his house from bad spirits. The same way with a story. One day a man picks it up and makes it his own. Then it is true.

Nothing is so tiring to the reader as excavating nuggets of meaning from mountains of words.

Prepositional verbs grow like toadstools. Once there was credit in facing a problem. Now problems have to be faced up to. The prepositions add nothing of significance.

Picasso has been many times quoted as saying good artists copy, great artists steal.

haiku were not written to be weighed down with commentary. (Buson, p. 103)

too much explanation can take the pleasure out of any poetry. (Preface, vii)

In Lincoln's mind, at least as Lamon interpreted the story, "the illusion was a sign." Both the president-elect and his wife believed it meant he would not only survive his term in office, but four years later win reelection to a second one, only to die before it ended.

The author says that though the Mexican War wound down, the interpretation of it was just beginning.

One of Lincoln's intimates as a presidential candidate urged him to make no promises and not to part with those kind words which could be interpreted as promises.

Lincoln on a desire to hear Horace Greeley speak: "In print, every one of his words seems to weigh about a ton.

What would music, art, poetry, or literature be without emotion?

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.