Quotes About Interpretation

The death rate is a fact; anything beyond this is an inference.

A definition is death. A definition is the answer to which you must look up the question in the back of your book.

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death

What's 'the shit'?" "The picture we have of one another. Layers and layers of misunderstanding. The picture we have of ourselves. Useless. Presumptuous. Completely cocked-up. Only we go ahead and we live by these pictures. 'That's what she is, that's what he is, this is what I am. This is what happened, this is why it happened—

A ses yeux, celui qui donnait des signes extérieurs de bonté était bon, celui qui donnait des signes extérieurs de loyauté était loyal. Celui qui donnait des signes extérieurs d'intelligence, intelligent. C'est ainsi qu'il n'avait jamais vu clair en sa fille, ni en sa femme, ni en sa seule et unique maîtresse – il était sans doute loin de voir clair en lui...

It's not your fault that you don't know what Gentiles think when they read something like this.

They don't know about art. Maybe I don't know about art myself. Maybe none of our family does, not the way that you do. But that's my point. People don't read art—they read about people.

He pronounces "death" like "debt.

fingerprint—it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.

All models are wrong," the statistician George Box observed, "but some are useful.

He learned, like every good novelist, that human behaviour can neither be explained nor predicted, only rendered.

Everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Hebrews: No one knows who wrote Hebrews, but it probably first went to Christians in danger of slipping back into their old, rule-bound religion. It interprets the Old Testament, explaining many Jewish practices as symbols that prepared the way for Christ.

He lambastes Catholics. He opposes the J. B. Phillips version of the Bible because Phillips had a friendship with C. S. Lewis, who drank beer and smoked a pipe.

The artist became a subcreator.

I don't think your God has ever advised you otherwise. You hear only what you want. He only ever commands your preferences.

Derrida s'intéressait moins au roman qu'à l'écriture, et ce qui l'a fasciné c'est le fait que j'ai fait de l'écriture un roman.

No matter how flat you make a pancake, it's still got two sides.

Al Hickey: It's not about anything. Frank Boggs: Yeah, it's about four hundred grand

stares down at her spinach. "It looks like poop," she says.

You don't make art, you find it

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today that it ever was.

What is a face really? It's own photo? It's makeup? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

Et puis quoi, qu'importe la culture ? Quand il a écrit Hamlet, Molière avait-il lu Rostand ? Non.