Quotes About Interpretation

As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.

To me, I don't see any difference between a synthesizer and an acoustic instrument. It's what's done on it that counts.

The arts investigate the properties of the world by playing with materials - such as stone, paint, fabric, synthetic substances, the human body, the human voice and of course language.

In the previous chapter we discussed how a figure of speech fails when images are too farfetched or mixed, or when one image cancels out the other. The same principle applies to physical descriptions.

Eliot was scornful of idle women readers who imagined themselves the heroines of French novels, and of self-regarding folk who saw themselves in the most admirable character in a novel, and she hoped for more nuanced engagement from her own readers. Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience.

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Here's an alarming fact: of approximately eight hundred thousand words in the English language, we use about eight hundred on a regular basis. Those eight hundred words have fourteen thousand meanings. By division there are about seventeen meanings per word. In other words, we have a one-in-seventeen chance of being understood as we intended. Perhaps you've heard of Chisholm's Third Law—If you explain something so clearly that no one can misunderstand, someone will.

I should like to repeat what I stated recently in the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia: It won't be the religion, but rather the world-view of some of its followers that shall be made current.

It's not what you tell your players that counts. It's what they hear.

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I don't actually like explaining the meanings of my songs, because I think people can take away more from it if they use their imagination.

No matter what you're going through, as long as you have some specific emotion, whether it's positive or negative, it is all stuff that you can use on stage.

No one can know the true meaning of the language of spiritual writers if he is unable to explain it theologically; and, on the other hand, no one can know the sublimity of theology if he is ignorant of its relations to mysticism.

Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people who present them.

Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.

If philosophers were always in agreement about the meaning of words, almost all their disputes would evaporate.

It's funny, I've decided 'Hallelujah' is a kind of Rorschach test for people, because everyone has a different reaction to it and to what I'm doing. I just sang it, and whatever came out was just natural and spontaneous and maybe that's the best thing, because there's a kind of enigma, both in the meaning of the words and the way Leonard Cohen said them, that catches people's attention.