Quotes About Interpretation

The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.

The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out.

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

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

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

"What is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

When you are describing, A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things, With a sort of mental squint.

"If it had grown up," she said to herself, "it would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think."

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on."I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least—at least I mean what I say—that's the same thing, you know.""Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"

Everything has got a moral if you can only find it.

An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation.

The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn't exactly false, either.

Once the web has lost its charm, its terms lose theirs; suddenly they seem contingent and open to revision. For those epi-predators who work with the signifiers themselves rather than the things they supposedly signify, language is not a medium that helps us see the true, the real, the natural. Language is a tool assembled by creatures with "no way" trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs; it is a tool those same creatures can disassemble if it fails them.

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.

What an old-fashioned rationalist would regard as 'meaning-less ritual' was rather, on this interpretation, the ancient foundation layer of all modes of order and significance.

I would urge everyone to start looking at the world in a different way. Spend some time looking at everyday objects, at their design, their shape, their individual characteristics. Think ahead and imagine their significance.

Some people read an interesting or provocative newspaper article, and that's the end of that. A writer reads such an article, and her imagination gets fired up. Questions occur to her. She might feel an urge to finish the story that the article suggests.

The idea is not to reinvent myself by venturing into different media because my film career has come to a standstill, but I have the urge to interpret life through different media.

I think with any art making, there's a sense of urgency that you have for people to understand you.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.