Quotes About Interpretation

Anyone who sees the realism in Lynch truly understand poetry!

We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

I think translation is an impossible job, and I admire the people who do it in a way that brings poetry to us that we wouldn't have access to.

Give shape, artist! don't talk! Your poem be but a breath.

Poetic effect is the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

According to me [Sigmund ] Freud did not notice that the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,resembling in that, poetry or other art forms.

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance . . .

If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.

We always cut our poetical theories to suit our talent.

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.

Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

The works have to look like they're confident. But they also have to look sort of troubled. It's this weird thing: "Does that look confident and troubled?" It's a bit like difficult poetry.

The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.