Quotes About Interpretation

La ciencia describe y explica la realidad, pero la literatura expresa lo que supone para nosotros formar parte de esa realidad.

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want

One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's no truth

The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn't have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. That is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do.

The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

My mamma and I have interesting literary discussions like the following which took place over some Modern Library books that I had just ordered: SHE: "Mobby Dick. I've always heard about that." ME: "Mow-by Dick." SHE: "Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called Idiot. What's it about?" ME: "An idiot.

The straightforward manner is seldom equal to the complications of the good subject. There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

Symbols are something [the writer] uses simply as a matter of course. You might say that theses are details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction … the truer the symbol, the deeper it leads you, the more meaning it opens up

There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it.

There is nothing like being pleased with your own work - and this is the best stage - before it is published and begins to be misunderstood.

Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.

The reader may not see [these meanings], but they have their effect on him nonetheless. This is the way the modern novelist sinks, or hides his theme

Librarians are the last people you can trust about the inside of books.

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say the way God sees events from above?