Quotes About Interpretation

In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

What is the difference between describing 'how' and explaining 'why'? To describe 'how' means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain 'why' means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others.

Dreaming is a language

I sense you in the secret of all the paintings I love. I hear you stumbling at the stony core of the only books I read, the few I know how to read.

in front of any painting, figurative or non-figurative I felt more and more that the lines and all their consequences, the contours, the forms, the perspectives, the compositions, became exactly like the bars on the window of a prison. Far away, amidst colour, dwelt life and liberty. And in front of the picture I felt imprisoned, and I believe it is because of that same feeling of imprisonment that van Gogh exclaimed, 'I long to be freed from I know now what horrible cage!

Everybody in their own imagination decides what scary is.

For nearly 40 years Johannes Meintjes has enriched the South African art scene with his personalised works which have the inherent quality of good art - the artist's genuine feelings and moods can be felt in each brush or palette stroke…

My dad doesn't get any of my jokes. He laughs at them, but he doesn't understand them. He's just laughing because people around him are laughing.

I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Islam has no religious establishment -- no popes, no bishops -- that can declare by fiat which is the correct interpretation. As a result, the decision to oppose the state on the grounds that is insufficiently Islamic belongs to anyone who wishes to exercise it.

There is nothing right and wrong until anyone defines it."

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

The biblical tale of Man's creation is, of course, the crux of the debate—at times bitter—between Creationists and Evolutionists and of the ongoing confrontation between them—at times in courts, always on school boards. As previously stated, both sides had better read the Bible again (and in its Hebrew original);

dated to the ninth

The words are the words of English, but the sense is the sense of confusion.

If right were ultimately right, its differentiation from not-right would require no debate.

an in-depth look reveals considerably more than a casual glance

If religion had a good purpose, then man would have created something great. But we're man: we mess up everything. We mess up nature. We mess up God. We take what is given to us and make it into what we think it should be.

Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence -- by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present -- but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word "quarters" the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.

Thanks," he said. "De nada," said Julius. "What does that mean?" said Charlie. "It's nothing, in Spanish." said Julius. "I mean, it means nothing, the word nothing, not that it doesn't mean anything, though of course it doesn't mean anything, it means something: it means nothing. Nothing is what it means. Not that it doesn't mean anything." "No, it means nothing, I know what you mean." said Charlie with a straight face. They started to giggle.

The Greeks Had a Word for It.

I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.

A good writer sees the world, not through his own eyes, but through his reader's mind.

A writer draws a road map where readers walk with their love, joy, anger, tears, and dismay. Every story, every poem, has different meanings for every reader.