Quotes About Interpretation

Every great film should seem new every time you see it." Roger Ebert

It is often said that great works of art are "inexhaustible"—capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of "endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, demonstrates in painful if inadvertently hilarious detail that this does not mean that works of art are immune from - that they are not in fact often subject to—wild and perverse misinterpretation.

The Chinese character for "crisis," he pointed out to me, combines the characters for "danger" and "opportunity.

Buffett found it 'extraordinary' that academics studied such things. They studied what was measurable, rather than what was meaningful. 'As a friend [Charlie Munger] said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

The Text is not a definitive object.

The Text is without a source -- the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

language is never innocent.

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least.

but words are symbols, and symbols never resonate the same for everyone.

The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity.

If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.

Again, we find in modern art and modern music a language which does not communicate.

what is significant about rejection, as a source of neurotic anxiety, is how it is interpreted by the child. In impact upon the child, there is radical difference between rejection as an objective experience (which does not necessarily result in subjective conflict for the child), and rejection as a subjective experience. The important question psychologically is whether the child felt himself or herself rejected.

in psychology I do not believe "stress" encompasses the rich meaning of anxiety.

he also noticed that certain things which he felt deeply changed their meaning at the touch of words, so that he could no longer recognize them himself as he spoke. So that indeed he often wondered whether thinking were enough, whether thoughts were not a mere groping for something that was forever out of reach...

There is, of course, Niemen, in Switzerland, and Horsschitt, in Germany... It all depends on what you mean by 'love'.

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.