Quotes About Interpretation

I have often said that the negative is similar to a musician's score, and the print to the performance of that score. The negative comes to life only when performed as a print.

Porque en ese proceso no están solo las palabras que se dicen: está también la forma y manera como se dicen.

No matter what the anticipated result, there will always be someone eager a. to misinterpret it, b. to fake it, or c. to believe it happened according to his own pet theory.

All of us, when we travel, look at the places we go, the things we see, through different eyes. And how we see them is shaped by our previous lives, the books we've read, the films we've seen, the baggage we carry.

But this one was a writer, not a reader.

Translation is not a matter of words only; it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

English is a curiously expressive language. Womb, room, tomb. It sums up living in three words.

There's the mackerel of the cornflake for you, you dirty reader of filth and nastiness.

Besame los yarblocos- El lerdo

Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.

when Arnold Schoenberg replied to a student who had dreamed of composing a "soaring melody," that the proper word, surely, was "snoring." Such puns could be funny, cruel, and tone-deaf (in seven nations and twelve tones), comments of exasperation as often as they were attempts at endearment.

I did not, however, as yet see him as one of those symbolic figures, of whom most people possess at least one example, if not more, round whom the past and the future have a way of assembling.

People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical.

Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better than a flat assertion of bare fact.

Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.

Like everything that's any good, it has about twenty different meanings.

The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them,' he used to say.

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.

How you feel is not the result of what is happening in your life—it is your interpretation of what is happening.

Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning we give it.

it's not our references, but our interpretations of them, the way we organize them—that clearly determine our beliefs.

It's not the events that shape my life that determine how I feel and act, but, rather, it's the way I interpret and evaluate my life experiences.