Quotes About Interpretation

The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me — me and every other reader — by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I'll never read.

But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?

To say "I" is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other.

as Stevenson so mournfully put it, that is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes.

Reading Kafka, I sense that the elicited questions are always just beyond my understanding.... They promise an answer but not now, perhaps next time, next page. Something in his writing... allows me approximations, intuitions, half-dreams, but never total comprehension.... Kafka offers me absolute uncertainties which fit so many of my own.

Desde siempre, el poder del lector ha suscitado toda clase de temores (...)temor al lector individual que puede, a partir de un texto, redefinir el universo y rebelarse contra sus injusticias.

What we put into words are the shadows of shadows, and every book confesses the impossibility of holding fully onto whatever it is that our experience seizes. All our libraries are the glorious records of that failure.

Every story is a palimpsest, composed of layers of tellings and retellings, and every time we think we are parroting a well-known anecdote the words shed their feathers and sprout new ones for the occasion.

All reading is interpretation, every reading reveals and is dependent on the circumstances of its reader.

Was andere als unsere Errungenschaften betrachten, ist oft nicht das, was wir selbst so sehen.

Ésa es la riqueza y la dificultad de la literatura: que no es un dogma.

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

Two great appetites of the soul - the urge to independence and self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence - were fused with, and interpreted in the light of, a third - the urge to worship

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...

A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.

It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical. Profound and beautiful truth!

The writer proposes, the readers dispose.

Consequently, we find it convenient to be misled by the inadequacies of language and to believe (not always, of course, but just when it suits us) that things, persons and events are as completely distinct and separate one from another as the words, by means of which we think about them.

This is not drawing,' he cried, 'this is inspiration!' 'I had meant it to be drawing,' was Constable's characteristic answer.

And it's what you never will write, said the Controller. Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello.

Glad to hear what? asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last I see, and popped back, clapping shut the door behind her.