Quotes About Interpretation

Lots of lawyers don't like circumstantial evidence. I do. I've never had any quarrel with the evidence of circumstances. My quarrel is with the habit of giving events the obvious, careless interpretation. I dislike sloppy thinking.

Once a man forms an opinion, he starts interpreting facts in the light of that belief. He ceases to be an impartial judge of facts.

In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV...never had a garage sale.

I try, but somehow I am always the woman in the wrong line. Lines are like a foreign language. You have to know how to read and to translate them. What looks to me like a thirty-second transaction invariably ends up as a tenor thirty-minute wait.

The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

When struck by a thunderbolt it is unnecessary to consult the Book of Dates as to the precise meaning of the omen.

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.

I sometimes think my style is suggestive rather than direct. The reader must often use his imagination or lose the most subtle part of my thought.

Robert Jordan knew that now his papers were being examined by the man who could not read.

Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

do you want me to shoot thee, ingles ?... quieres ? it is nothing.

Yes Tatie, and you and Chink always talking about how to make things true, writing them, and put them rightly and not describe. I remember everything. Sometimes he was right and sometimes you were right. I remember the lights and textures and the shapes you argued about.

I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat.

That has nothing to do with the story.

Inaccrochable - A picture a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either. -said by Gertrude Stein

As he had originally planned to do, Hemingway took the external details of the story and presented them from the point of view of the fisherman. He thus made it possible for the reader to participate imaginatively in the story. That effect was always Hemingway's primary aim as a writer.

it is always a mistake to know an author

I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.

Úr orðum mínum gerði hann þá eitthvað sem varð að afmá, og stundum helst sjálfan mig um leið.