Quotes About Interpretation

A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.

If you believe in the Bible, you've got to do business with it and not just screen it out.

Customers are human and humans can view situations in unexpected ways.

I told my wife she looks sexy with black fingernails. Now she thinks I slammed the car door on her hand on purpose.

It was 100 feet of 16 mm black-and-white film of a car coming to a stop sign, and driving off. I had to decide how to frame and light it. It was magic. There was a sense of mystery.

When I listen to the engine of my car, I might say it sounds fine, but it would not occur to me to say "What lovely music!

When you play a character, you bring yourself into the character. You get a chance to shine and show your translation for the character and her state of mind.

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

many of our mood swings are related to how we interpret what happens. If we look closely at our mood swings, we'll notice that something always sets them off. We carry around a subjective reality that is continually triggering our emotional reactions.

What do I think about the story? he asked himself. I don't even know if we've got the right version. But no, that's not the point. The right version would presumably be true, and a legend doesn't have to be true, it has other things to do.

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls....

Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested. I well remember the moment at which I discovered that history was not a matter of received opinion.

History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication--much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But... the past is real. This is simplistic, but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence.

That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely

he started to talk about the Paleolithic, about cave art, about the way in which the term art is itself an anachronism since those who created these images could not have been doing so with any understanding of the concept of art as we know it.

For any spirit of scientific bent, seeing more in something that is actually there is actually to see less. What you add in substance, you take away in spirit.

figuring out was is real isn't always possible, because our own brains are telling us stories

The greatest rule in doing biblical exegesis is that the immediate context of a passage is crucial in determining the meaning of that passage.

None of it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble with history. It's the one thing we have to make up for ourselves.

But 'if ' is not a word to use in history.

The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.

The brain is a funny thing, the way it works, always looking for the most polite explanation...

What each culture views as the cause of madness is dependent on its world view.

Public facts are not like pebbles on the beach, lying in the sun and waiting to be seen. They must instead be picked, polished, shaped and packaged. Finally ready for display they the bear the marks of their shapers.