Quotes About Interpretation

Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.

Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one—quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.

There are plenty of artists who are awoken by criticism to the meaning of their own works: such, for example, was T. S. Eliot's response to Helen Gardner's book about his poetry—namely, at last I know what it means.

In art, however, we create a realm of the imagination, in which each beginning finds its end, and each fragment is part of a meaningful whole.

Kant's position is extremely subtle – so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers — all depending on what you are looking for. But if you think there's only one right answer, then you'll stop looking as soon as you find one.

If the liberal arts do nothing else, they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: There is generally more than one side to a story.

As for the rest of him, his function is rather like that of an anti-computer: you feed him all kinds of carefully garnered facts, figures, and statistics and he translates them into garbage.

Only a fool believes that life has but one meaning.

If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. As they do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use.

What's truth, anyway? Truth is what you make it.

No two authors can render the same story in the same fashion.

Their voices lack the thrust and dip of men chewing over their words and tasting them. They

By looking at his face, I could no more tell whether he was lying, in whole or in part, than I could learn by scrutinizing the Jack of, say, Diamonds.

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

I can't get to know you means I shall never know what you really think of me. I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas as I do.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

I have a disease; I see language.

that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.

It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.