Quotes About Interpretation

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent.

I don't expect to have a fully verified story of how Jo's disorder developed, but I don't think that historical accuracy is as important as what I call "emotional truth." People attach different levels of significance to the same events. No two participants in any event remember it in exactly the same way. A single broken promise, for example, among thousands of promises kept, might not be remembered by a parent, but may never be forgotten by the child who was disappointed. (34)

I know music is subjective.

He'd also explained that while you could

Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities".

Chances are no one is speaking to you in some secret code that can only be cracked by an enigma machine.

Subsequent history is written as if these normative positions were the product of social consensus rather than of conflict

Ceux qui disent que le S est un serpent ont un problème avec leur S...

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

Horse: Wood like you were sporting usually implies the opposite. Unless it was for me? If that's the case, I'm genuinely flattered. No judgements.

It suffered and died in translation.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

No one knew better than he how an understanding of poetry depends on an understanding of the poet's universe.

It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life.

It didn't fit her ideas of who was bad, and who was good, and what was a happy ending, and what wasn't.

words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.

The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.

These guys may not talk too much about relationships, but they sure do blush at telling moments, don't they? Maybe that's the key to understanding the opposite sex; I could invent a science, call it blushology.

Everyone finds a way to make their side the right one, after all.

Call it art, you can get away with anything.

But that's the nice thing about looking backwards. You can pick out the bits that suit your story and toss the unhappy truths to the wind.

Evil is not the opposite of good. It is what we call another man's notion of good when it differs from ours.