Quotes About Interpretation

You can tell all the stories you want, but you still haven't gotten across what the experience was like. It's like telling somebody a dream. It doesn't give them the dream. So

The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.

We can only interpret the behavior of others through the screen we create.

Si es arte no es para todos, y si es para todos no es arte.

Matisse, consultado sobre la piel verde: No estoy pintando una mujer. Estoy pintando un cuadro.

it's not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium

Childrens ilogic can be an exquisitely structured mistake.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

It was the artist's duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience's job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.

A wise man once said that in order to communicate, you have to be able to speak in someone else's language.

I think there is a difference between comic essays and war reporting, and people can tell that.

It's common to be misread by people who don't know you.

Trying to explain moral principles to Khe Sahn was like reviewing a standard 1040 tax form with a house cat!

them. "You said it was how big?

In the end I decided the word was more about him than it was about me. But isn't it often that way? It's one thing for someone to describe you in print, to go through several drafts and, after careful consideration, choose the adjective

When I bleat here on page seventeen, do you want me to just bleat or to really let go and 'bleat, bleat'? " I asked. "I feel like 'bleat, bleating,' but if Mother/Destroyer is going to be crawling through the birth canal of concertina wire, I don't want to steal focus, you know what I mean?" He did. That was the scary part, that someone understood me.

Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I've been hoisting for the past sixty years.

In the end I decided the word was more about him than it was about me. But isn't it often that way?

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid." —Jules Feiffer

always try to read form as content, style as meaning.

Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage.

he ended his short note with a riddle: v. n. A. 1. de A. o. na. v. e. r. Historians have found it hard enough to transcribe the letters accurately, let alone to understand them. And full interpretation remains elusive.

Too many musicians — singers and instrumentalists — performed it so many times that it's hard not to just go through the motions of playing (or singing) the notes, rather than remembering that you have to turn the notes into real music.

Calvin was not of stone, and if there are Reformed people who are, they are poor Calvinists.