Quotes About Interpretation

It is not impossible, however uncongenial the thought may be to the Citadel, that many unscientific reality-tunnels, explored by, say, painters, or poets, or musicians, or novelists, or mystics, may be not non-existent but merely not-tuned-in by those who have not practiced for many years in tuning-in painterly or poetic or musical or novelistic or mystical brain circuits.

Perhaps, in the year 2598, some historians will claim that there never were "hippies," while others will claim that hippies existed but didn't actually smoke marijuana, and a third group will insist that the hippies, always stoned out of the skulls on belladonna, ran through the streets attacking innocent bystanders.

The magician knows that in an information-overload situation, spectators only see what they came prepared to see.

EMIC realities are the realities created by people communicating with each other. It's one of the major discoveries of the social sciences in the last 80 years that a very large percentage (nobody has found a way of mathematically estimating it, but a very large percentage) of what we experience is EMIC reality. A large percentage of what we experience just exists because our society has talked it into existence.

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say I love fish, and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

Jesus Christ," she said. "You are just like him, a master of the fucking oblique answer.

We do much better," she said, "explaining why people did things than we do at predicting what they will do.

It was just a sense that in almost all my dealings with almost everyone I'd talked with, there was another story being told that I couldn't hear.

Tony's patois kept getting broader as we talked. Like Hawk, he seemed able to turn it on and off. "Sho 'nuff," he said.

Do you have a diagnosis?" "It's what in my profession we call characterological." "Which means you haven't an explanation." "Basically yes," Susan said. "It's simply how you are." "You sure?" "Yes.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not.

Trivial, he echoed. Perhaps. Then again, maybe it's all in the way you look at it

It is the glory and good of Art That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth - to mouths like mine, at least.

All lives are interesting – how interesting depends on the telling

I have found, Mr. Noir, that if you make a story with gaps in it, people just step in to fill them up, they can't help themselves.

You good with Arabic?" Bam! Out of left field, and now Stone was smiling. There were many Arabic dialects, from Moroccan Arabic with Berber words which often did not even sound Arabic, to the aristocratic Arabic spoken by the Saudi royal family, which was different from the Arabic spoken in the streets.

Is it his job to lie?" "No, but you're assuming it's a lie. Reasonable people can disagree and have opposing interpretations of the facts. It's Jonathan's job to present an interpretation that's favorable to his client. It would be malpractice for him to do otherwise." When she said it she was stiff and testy, and it felt like we were having a confrontation.

He is defiling justice." Defiling. That was probably the merlot talking.

Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.

Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.

People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; twenty-five percent like me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the right reasons. It's that last twenty-five percent that worries me.

He thought that I was after him for a feather--- The white one in his tail: like one who takes everything said as personal to himself.

The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.