Quotes About Interpretation

When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?

Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she'd construct a story from it worthy of a novel.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

People responded to body language without even thinking. It was important to get it absolutely right.

A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.

When engaging youth with the Bible-as-story, we must be wary of our impulse to "clarify" what's happening in a given narrative, to explain "what John is getting at" or "what Matthew is trying to say" or "what Paul really means here."13 I've been guilty of this more times than I care to admit, and I'm not alone.

Part of the magic of the imagination is that it can conjure something out of nothing except the simple medium of words until the hearer really feels as though she's experiencing a multisensory event.

as Flannery O'Connor put it, "In the act of writing, one sees that the way a thing is made, controls and is inseparable from the whole meaning of it. The form of a story gives it meaning which any other form would change."6

If we trust Jesus' own storytelling approach, we must trust the Spirit to work in and through story without the need to interpret every metaphor, every parable, every time. But

As we already said, authors receive their ideas from somewhere; and in the case of holy scriptures, that somewhere is the mind of God. Human beings encountered Someone outside of their ordinary, everyday experience; and that Someone provided both the source and the interpretive lens for the way those encounters were narrated.

In partnership with playfulness, the imagination gives us the ability to find and make purposeful patterns and even plotlines: in other words, the ability to find and make meaning.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

Medical theories are most of the time even more peculiar than the facts themselves.

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

I don't consider [my] photographs fashion photographs. The photographs were for fashion, but at the same time they had an ulterior motive, something more to do with the world in general.

...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)

Those who attempts to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.

The theory has to be interpreted that extra dimensions beyond the ordinary four dimensions the three spatial dimensions plus time are sufficiently small that they haven't been observed yet.

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

A lot of musicians have a tough time hearing what we're doing in a trio format.