Quotes About Interpretation

To say that the artist is not serving humanity is monstrous. He has been the eyes, the ears, the voice of humanity. He was always the transcendentalist who x-rayed our true states of being. His role in European culture is clear enough. Here he is given an inferior status, because he is not obviously and directly useful. His usefulness cannot be measured. The artist cannot serve directly.

I never saw as clearly as with Artaud what the meaning of poetry is: it is an abstraction, to match allegorical patterns.

One of my notes says: "Correct Anaïs' English." Do you want me to do that, or would Hugo consider that I am encroaching on his private domain?

Noi non vediamo le cose come sono; le vediamo come siamo noi.

Él cuenta con que yo entenderé, porque yo, como él, soy escritora. He de saber. Debe estar claro para mí. Para su sorpresa, le digo exactamente lo que tú dices: «No es lo mismo.» Hay un mundo eternamente cerrado para él, el mundo que contiene nuestras conversaciones abstractas, nuestros besos, nuestros éxtasis.

he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work.

And. the page on the "I" and "he"—the double motif—is really superbly done. "Have I invented him? Am I talking? Am I what he is saying?" And when he tells you to shut up because you are deforming your own thought. Very beautiful.

A writer could completely baffle a psychologist." A writer and a woman, a woman with imagination, too, and a psychologist half blinded. Oh yea?

Every line is pregnant with meaning and however much the meaning is ransacked, the riddle will remain because only you can explain it, and this riddle is your last triumph—you will never reveal it.

The unconscious cannot express itself directly because it is a composite of past, present, future, a timeless alchemy of many dimensions. A direct statement, as for an act, would deprive it of its effectiveness. It is an image which bypasses the censor of the mind, affects our emotions and our senses. An act has to be interpreted on two levels—one as action, the other as meaning.

It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics....

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

What I have sought is to understand what has been said.

Historically, discussions among Hindu sub-traditions were dialogical, and there was a notable absence of systematic efforts to stamp out other alternative ways of religious thinking. The language of engagement was not militaristic, and differences, though important, were not seen as problematic. It would be a tragedy if, like the opponents of Deepa Mehta's Fire, Hindus were to privilege a single interpretation of the tradition and hatefully denounce alternative understandings.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

El color de la verdad es gris.

When one talks it's in order to be understood.

An art book is a museum without walls.

The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

Be careful--with quotations, you can damn anything.

the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.

Historians rewrite the truth every day. What interests us is the truth that gets the reader to reach for his wallet

We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.