Quotes About Interpretation

sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

God—unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.

Authors are monkeys who mean

That God—unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God. That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.

I pay for the privilege of handing over to trained professionals responsibility not just for my experience but for my interpretation of that experience—i.e. my pleasure. My pleasure is for 7 nights and 6.5 days wisely and efficiently managed… just as promised in the cruise line's advertising—nay, just as somehow already accomplished in the ads, with their 2nd-person imperatives, which make them not promises but predictions.

people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it's a popular medium

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

Not real bright—she thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral 8, to give you an idea.

To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.

Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things?

Or that he's slow, Hal's brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found---but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things.

It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.

By simple definition. Every telling creates and limits and defines.

The fact that twenty years have gone by and we still do not agree what this novel means, or what exactly it was trying to say, despite saying (seemingly) everything about everything, is yet another perfect analogy for the Internet. Both are too big. Both contain too much. Both welcome you in. Both push you away.

That—to cut to a chase which the interviewers' hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement of the lamp's bulb with a much higher wattage signified they'd very much like to see cut to—as

For irony—exploiting gaps between what's said and what's meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.

The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations.

the facial creases of the shaggy middle Dean are now pursed in a kind of distanced affront, an I'm-eating-something-that-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-presence-of-whatever-I'm-drinking-along-with-it look

live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which the relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" 70 have been thrown into big-time flux.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words.

But they're shit.' 'And yet at the same time they're art. Exquisite pieces of art. They're literally incredible.' 'No, they're literally shit is literally what they are.

The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.

Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiast, but it's the truth nevertheless — pictures tell any story more effectively than words.