Quotes About Interpretation

Christian - One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.

If life were organized, there would be no need for art.

It's great fun to memorize somebody's biography, and then liberally play with the real facts of their life and go a step beyond reality.

And this vague little smile is my all purpose expression the meaning of which I will leave to your discretion.

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.

Truth lives in the spaces between words. It defies translation.

As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

I want it to be more universal than that - like a painter doesn't have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.

To find the true cause of how you think and feel, find the 'sponsoring thought' that created the interpretation that created your experience of life.

You know what's funny about movies? You can watch one, and then you watch it again at a different stage in your life, and you understand different messages from the same film.

With a film, I do my best to understand the author's intentions and try to bring the characters to life.

It's a neat experience to go from the blank page to an actor elevating it to the audience understanding it - the full life of that is why I became a writer.

I think when you're writing from your own life, it's hard because you realize that people have their own assessment of how they look, and they don't know how you will describe them.

If you cross-section anyone's life from one angle and then another, what constitutes goodness looks different each time. It's not an absolute.

Fiction is an improvement on life

Other potentially misleading terms include "cosmology" and "psychology." In

[On the possibility of an Arab victory at Poitiers:] Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

When people are finding meaning in things - beware.

Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo," the seventeenth-century master of haiku, Matsuo Bash?, wrote in a series of insightful reflections on poetry. I would extend Bash?'s wisdom about nature, and about the poetry of nature in particular, to include the particular nature of poetry: learn about poetry from the poem .

The poet of Whit-manesque ambitions must find a way to present something that has as its sole purpose taking things away.