Quotes About Interpretation

What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both.

Está muy disgustado porque nunca le das un beso. La contradije: —Pues no pone cara de disgustado. —Es un grave error juzgar por la cara, en uno u otro sentido.

I thought I'd try to write her a life

Music begins where the possibilities of language end

Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.

I don't like answering private questions. The answers are often ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. Even when the other person is close to you.

Yet I understood the poetry of such mind games one day when, attempting to ask for my glasses (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way.

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.

Stories are always true... it's the facts that mislead.

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other.

The earth is round and flat at the same time. This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe.

Vertel me een verhaal, Silver. Wat voor verhaal? Het verhaal van wat daarna gebeurde. Dat hangt ervan af. Waarvan? Van hoe ik het vertel.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently