Quotes About Interpretation

When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us.

the great statistician Frederick Mosteller had a point when he said, "It is easy to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them." Nevertheless, there are some steps you can take to, as Huff put it, "talk back to a statistic." Among the biggies recommended by many scientists is to ask a simple question: Does the figure, finding, or correlation make sense, that is, accord with what you know of objective reality?

We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.

The terrible thing about public school is they take young children who are natural poets and storytellers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk "about it".

Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.

Writers step into their subject's shoes so readers can walk in them.

Every silence says something: the silence between words, between notes in music and between people.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

No, no," Arnie says. "Fondle--fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung..." "Farflung is Yiddish." "No," Arnie says, "it's not.

Character displays "the weighty impatience of having to explain something that should already be understood.

His mouth formed an O with lips torn angry in laying duck's eggs from a chicken's rectum.

Just definitions either prevent or put an end to a dispute.

The hand of one person may express more than the face of another.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Art is just another way to describe and classify reality – its mystical aspects merely a function of ignorance.

That's what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.

Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.

In Dreams... well, I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire, so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it.

WRITER Actors come and go, pal—you guys are the furniture, okay? What I write is the house. Let's not get all precious about it . . .

We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.

The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth (Niels Bohr)." By this, he means that we require a larger reading of the human past, of our relations with each other, the universe and God, a retelling of our older tales to encompass many truths and to let us grow with change.