Quotes About Interpretation

If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal order of the poem itself. By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

But such an affection for what doesn't fit and won't comport, reality out of place...

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

All ethnography is part philosophy and a good deal of the rest is confession.

Why do women have cunts?" "I can't imagine." "So that men will talk to them.

A picture may be worth a thousand words but it needs a thousand words to describe a picture.

We find in silence and body language the shadow of truth.

Body language is good enough to express yourself.

Many people are misquoted not by the language that they speak, but by the language of their behaviors that protrude their personalities.

The extension of human thinking is not only felt in dreaming when you are asleep. You can express it further by interpreting it in the outside world.

When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

In these circumstances I think we must take the bull by the horns and, making due allowances, quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

One man's pornography is another man's theology.

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.

The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience--that is to say, they must be subjective.

The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion vary with each individual.