Quotes About Interpretation

I think the toughest thing for me to figure out, as an actor, was how to translate all those layers that are in there and that history that the writers have done such a great job at forming.

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.

Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

History is written by the victors.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

History is, indeed, an argument without end.

History is no criminal court

History is a Rorschach test, people. What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past.

I'm a dramatist. Dramatists have a right to look at history and interpret it the way they see it.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

If I win, I'm a prodigy. If I lose, then I'm crazy. That's the way history is written.

Western man wrote "his" history as if it were the history of the entire human race.

Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

A mere collector of supposed facts is as useful as a collector of matchboxes.

History, of course, is never real. People either glorify it or horrify it. Or at the very least color it.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

Any historical narrative is a bundle of silences.

History is a lie commonly agreed upon.

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.