Quotes About Interpretation

for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.

The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his.

fiction can't be written to comply with winning arguments.

many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don't open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you've seen her at all?

That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read.

when she'd finished she would give one of four possible judgments. "Zippy"—which was good; "Important"—which was very good; "Controversial"—which could be either good or bad, you never knew; or "Lidderary," which was pronounced with a sigh and an eye roll and was very bad.

It was the spirit of the times: we applied high theory to shampoo ads, philosophy to NWA videos.

Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1

He peered down the hallway at the shadowy form of Joyce through the glass and scratched his testicles, sadly.

After all, you can storm the house of a novel like Barthes, rearranging the furniture as you choose, or you can enter on your knees, like the pilgrim Nabokov thought you were, and try to figure out the cunning design of the place - the house will stand either way.

It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could "put it over.

Now, another way to think about this is that Shakespeare's ego was so very insatiable he thought he could speak for everybody: a black duke, a transvestite girl, a carefree prince, a mad king. But we tend not to think of it that way, in Britain, instead we consider Shakespeare's breed of impersonality among the highest literary virtues.

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he is a saint or they are not telling the whole story.

Komerciniame mene - o visas šio vardo nusipeln?s menas anks?iau ar v?liau tampa komercinis - kvailumas beveik visada slypi steb?tojo žvilgsnyje

Basing his work on F.R. Leavis's (1895–1978) ideas on literary criticism, Hoggart argued that a critical reading of art could reveal "the felt quality of life" of a society. Only art could recreate life in all its rich complexity and diversity.

She ain't a fact and neither do she make a good story when you tell about her.

For the folklore Hurston collected so meticulously as Franz Boas's student at Barnard became metaphors

Ah'm hard of understandin' at times.

That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment.

No one can understand my accent!

I would say the Geordie accent and the scouse accent are similar in terms of I don't understand anything!

I think that some works are more accessible than others.

I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible.

I work according to the kind of character they want me to play.