Quotes About Interpretation

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

A singer for me is more like someone who is standing alone with a microphone like Scott Walker, rather than someone who is bashing a plank and is spitting all over a microphone.

My learning process is by eye alone it's not at all scientific.

My attitude with covers is, make it your own or else leave it alone.

Why are black folks singing Amazing Grace which is a song about a white slaver's conversion?

Did the poet use red to symbolize blood? Anger? Lust? Or is the wheelbarrow simply red because red sounded better than black?

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says. By such signs you can tell, for instance, what he thinks of his wife . . .

But I had read all of [the Bible] by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

NOTICE Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.

Things can only be true in a specific way, for one reader at a time, at a particular moment in a reader's life.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

It's a great metaphor. For what? I don't know to this day. But I know it's a great metaphor.

Most details are factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.

I have learned, over the years, to see the actions of our visitors as a sort of illustrative language, communication built out of images and events. For

If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.

Read The Story of O. Convince yourself that it was in fact written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman.

What is experienced from within cannot be categorized in concepts that have been developed for the external world of the senses.

The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.

Perhaps you think you see a certain contradiction here? In that case, a word in your ear. Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn't exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you!--you have married a monster.