Quotes About Interpretation

If a meteor falls in the forest and no one realizes it, does it end the war?

Nice concept. But is it a trilogy or a tweet? I can't tell any more.

it had never occurred to him before now that people could see reality in completely different ways.

At Harvard I learned most uncomfortably that facts are facts. In Italy I learned that facts are the way you look at them.

One man's act of absurdity may be another's substitute for solace.

What can books do that movies can't? Put the vision in the hands of the reader. With a book, you've got a writer and a director—and the director is the reader.

The great thing about alpha was that it could be explained:

La realtà è sempre impresentabile; e l'arte esiste anche per questo scopo specifico, di renderla migliore e degna di essere raccontata.

She sits there for some time, poring over it repeatedly, and you're intrigued to imagine what it might contain, and particularly long to know the words that cause a momentary smile -- but since she's seated at some distance from you, all you can do is guess at the meaning of the parts where the ink is blackest.

Beware the treachery of words... Words seem to be well-woven baskets ready to hold your meaning, but they betray you with rotted corners and splintered stays.

Beware the treachery of words, Mrs Sparrow. They mean one thing to one person and the opposite to another.

I would urge us to be not too certain of our accustomed ways of looking at Genesis, and to open ourselves to the wisdom of the God-bearing men of the past who have devoted so much intellectual effort to understanding the text of Genesis as it was meant to be understood. These Holy Fathers are our key to understanding Genesis.

Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer.

No one has a transparent view of the world. In fact, we all carry around a personal worldview—the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world.

What we're seeing is that fundamentalism really has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with an outlook, regardless what your religion is.

The critic who doesn't like your work is correct. He doesn't like your work. This cannot be argued with.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

The book didn't generate anything. All it did was give people a chance to express the biases they had before they even opened the book.

Here's the truth that you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.

Picasso hesitates for a moment and asks, "So what do you think reality looks like?" The man grabs his wallet and pulls out a picture of his wife. "Here, like this. It's my wife." Picasso takes the photograph, looks at it, and grins. "Really? She's very small. And flat, too.

Each person has a story in his or her head, a narrative used to navigate the world. The extraordinary thing is that every person's narrative is different.

Meaning is like pornography, you know it when you see it.

My father once said I was as gullible as a fish. I thought he said edible. I thought he meant I was tasty. The

ILL-AH-NO-WAY