Quotes About Interpretation

There are two sides to every question.

Silence is also speech.

The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.

In Sumerian,the word for ear and wisdom is the same. The ear, which is located mostly internally and is coiled like a spiral or labyrinth, takes in sounds and begins to transform the imperceptible into meaning. -Inanna–Queen of Heaven and Earth1

Para Shen, un vestido no era un mero trozo de tela, sino una imagen llena de significados y de asociaciones.

Quizá la identidad de una persona sólo pueda definirse en relación a las identidades de los demás. O quizá cualquier identidad no sea más que una interpretación de los demás

He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.

I now know that if you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist, and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

D.H. Lawrence said that it was not living life that mattered but watching it be lived. I would say that it was not watching life that mattered but explaining what you saw.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.

He's reading it pretty good, but he's still reading it from the page, and every once in a while he stumbles over his words.

It reminds me what Uma Thurman once said about actors improvising: "What most actors call improvising is just stammering and swearing. But another word for improvising is writing. And that's not what you pay actors to do.

Now, many directors could and would say, So what? It's just a movie. You don't have to believe in giant monkeys to direct King Kong.

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

The priestly redactor who set down the Genesis tale, an initiate and a believer, attributed to the `fruit' the gift of self-consciousness, a remarkable observation because self-consciousness is one of the major traits that distinguish humankind from all other creatures. Is it not surprising that the composer of the story gave credit for this particular gift to our mushroom? It is unlikely that he was alone in doing so.

One of the most important truths about the war, as indeed about all human affairs, is that people can interpret what happens to them only in the context of their own experiences. . . . The fact that the plight of other people was worse than one's own did little to promote personal stoicism.

God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.

What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.