Quotes About Interpretation

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

A noun is a self-defeating wall, an adjective is a tenacious window.

I didn't really say everything I said.

I really didn't say everything I said.

I don't mean to be funny.

Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity.

People make music to get a reaction. Music is communication.

It is the biblical stories of dissent and disobedience, then, that give us the courage to wrestle with man and with God where we must.149 Such a posture is the only guarantee that the Mosaic law itself, whose interpretation is in the hands of men, will continue to serve as an expression of justice and of God's will.

To those who insist that nothing is equivalent to personal experience, We shall renew our argument, begging them to meditate on the preceding lines, drawing their attention to the fact that a just opinion can only be formed when personal sentiment is excluded from the discussion.

M]y terror of forgetting is greater than my terror of having too much to remember. Let the accumulated facts about the past continue to multiply. ... So that those who need can find that this person did live, those events really took place, this interpretation is not the only one.

But theological change happens though selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn't just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting.

Micromessaging -- communicating with other human beings through visual, audible, sublingual means, no doubt predates our ability to speak. We actually read micromessages quite naturally without thinking about them. You might say human beings read each other's micromessages subconsciously, in the same way that one dog understands another dog is unfriendly simply because the dog's fur is standing on end. The dogs read each other perfectly. It's not all that different for people.

We allow words to obscure the interpretation of the deeper meaning.

God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellect.

The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.

The principle of least surprise is not for you only. The principle of least surprise means principle of least my surprise.

Man always finds the omens he wants.

Doesn't it seem as though her heart were a green flame? Perhaps it's the cold green heart of a small green snake, with a minute flaw in it, the kind of small green snake that slithers from branch to branch in the jungle, passing itself off as a vine. What's more, perhaps when she gave me the ring with such a gentle, loving expression, she wanted me to draw such a meaning from it some day.

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins.

I hope that I am making myself understood. The Golden Temple once more appeared before me. Or rather, I should say that the breast was transformed into the Golden Temple.

A work of art is by no means the property of its creator.

Não se pode explicar alguma coisa meramente lhe dando um nome.

I had long since insisted upon interpreting the things that Fate forced me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. In the nature of what I was calling my intelligence there was a touch of something illegitimate, a touch of the sham pretender who has been placed on the throne by some freak chance. This dolt of a usurper could not foresee the revenge that would inevitably be wreaked upon his stupid despotism.