Quotes About Interpretation

Sarah will talk to me about someone and I don't know who she's talking about, but if she talks to my mother, the two of them will know exactly - and across several generations, too.

Everyone talks about how much data's in the world. Except, actually, 80% of it is pretty blind to computers. I mean, it can store it. But if it's a movie, a poem, a song, it doesn't know what it's actually saying or doing.

I talked with Quentin about where the character came from, and he told me Kansas City. I don't know how somebody talks from Kansas City, so I made him from New York.

What is art? Art talks about life; it's subversive.

I think that, as a person, Beethoven talks to everyone in different ways.

I think younger fans can't quite grasp that's what you do as an actor. They're like, 'It doesn't make sense. How can he talk like this when he talks like that on the show!' It's really cute, actually.

See, Padam Kumar thinks and talks in Tamil and English. So for him, the words in 'Supari' were less important than how they were spoken.

Tame Impala has two lives. One is the album, which is like a producer, and the other life is like a band: more of a live incarnation where we're basically a covers band for the albums that I produce.

I wouldn't go so far as to make 'You Don't Own Me' a tango or 'It's My Party' a hip-hop thing. Believe me, those things have been suggested to me. But I thought if I could stay true to the song, the arrangements would work. I'm really enjoying singing them.

All these things make his present-day readers wish to tear their hair – or his – out of desperation" (James 1977, p. 44). "The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of [Hegel's] procedure, someone will accuse you of misunderstanding it.

Rorty is just as dismissive of James's many references to 'experience' – a word that appears in almost every text that James ever wrote. In short, Rorty's pragmatism is a pragmatism without experience. And frankly, I agree with those who have strongly argued that to eliminate experience from pragmatism (old or new) is to eviscerate pragmatism, to leave us with a gutless shadow of pragmatism.

From the perspective of the logical empiricists, the pragmatic thinkers were viewed as having seen through a glass darkly what was now seen much more clearly. The myth developed (and unfortunately became entrenched) that pragmatism was primarily an anticipation of logical positivism, in particular, the positivist's verifiability criterion of meaning.

The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation..

We would do well to come to the Bible with these words ringing in our ears: 'You have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . .

The thing is to sift out the important sounds, little syllables and vowels that bring hints of their lost words, and not to mistake the fossil for the life, or the kiss for the love, not to mistake the fragment for the sentence.

Ignore him. He thinks the Last Supper was nachos and Twinkies.

Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.

[S]ometimes... quotation marks are an absolute crime against humanity.

I think I'm always so much more happy with books and movies and stuff. I think I get more excited about well-done representations of life than life itself. - Celine

The big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

This is not merely the literary technique of overhearing

We are now more conscious of the problem of communication itself even in our own language. Familiar words have lost their meaning for many; or the same word means different things to different people. Jargon and cliches usurp the place of discriminating speech in many areas of life.

Weather is a kind of Rorschach test. We see in it what we need to see, or what we feel is missing from our lives.

We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.