Quotes About Interpretation

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

Words are but pictures of our thoughts.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

Some actors are better with words than me. I prefer to play it rather than say it - and keep people thinking.

However, no two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is - in other words, not a thing, but a think.

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.

It's important to be precise about words, because of the thought value of them-they frame and shape so much of the way we understand things.

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.

As an adult, I have often been deep in serious conversation with someone I've highly respected and seen them roll an eye as my mouth has mangled yet another magnificently conceived, clumsily articulated sentence. In my mind, the words are mellifluous as honey. In my mouth, they are shards of glass.

Words are not thoughts, just like bricks are not homes. But houses are made with bricks. If you have less bricks, you will make a small house. The more words you have, the clearer your thoughts, and the more clearly you can convey them.

What excites me about picture books is the gap between pictures and words. Sometimes the pictures can tell a slightly different story or tell more about the story, about how someone is thinking or feeling.

Words such as truth, art, veracity, or anything are stupid in themselves.