Quotes About Interpretation

tried to break his face down and describe it but i could only get the eyes. under the black hat, when i had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

I like the sound of people's voices, and I think what a man says can very well tell what he's thinking, whether he's lying or not.

who think of themselves as "spiritual rather than religious" tend to equate religion with belief, and therefore with doctrine and authority; with

It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts.

When we allow that the individual projects a definition of the situation when he appears before others, we must also see that the others, however passive their role may seem to be, will themselves effectively project a definition of the situation by virtue of their response to the individual and by virtue of any lines of action they initiate to him.

Isn't it interesting how we think of grace as something less than the law?

We do not see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.

Todo libro ha de hacer pedazos el silencio.

Én meg szavakkal szeretném elmondani azt, amit szavakkal nehéz.

Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.

Believe in the reader and they can connect the dots, if you succeed breathe life into the story

It is ironic that some people, like Guy, will minimize the emotional involvement to lessen the offense ("It meant nothing!"), while others, like Charmaine, will highlight the emotional nature of the bond for exactly the same purpose ("Nothing happened!").

As soon as we conform anything to language, we've changed it. Use a word and you've altered the world. The poets know this. It's what they try so hard to avoid.

Ulla Sallert, wearing one of her famous facial expressions with about eleven ambivalent meanings and twenty-three enigmatic nuances, drops into a deep curtsy.

The human animal is remarkably adept at seeing itself as the hero, no matter what the story.

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It's all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing--ambiguity is a fact of life.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

The first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape.

Making reality real is art's responsibility.

The art that speaks [truth] most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.