Quotes About Interpretation

In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking' in meaning.2 Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader.

A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well—better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.

It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.

NASIL'?n? anl?yorum: NEDEN'ini anlam?yorum.

I know better than any one what to think about my own plans, and I am always astonished that the critics dig so deep for them, when the simplest ideas, the most commonplace incidents, are the only inspiration to which the products of art owe their being. ~ April 12, 1851 in the Notice

The bible is literature, not dogma.

By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

There is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind's predisposition determines the type of world we see.

I just want to say that history, when it arrives, may not look as you expect, based on the reading of history books. Things in there are always so clear. One knows exactly what one would have done.

Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It's just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.

In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We'd better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.

What a story is "about" is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring. So: What do you care about in this story, so far? It's Marya.

The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

Language is a meaning approximator that sometimes gets too big for its britches and deceives us

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life"—he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

My point is that it's not the flavor of your taste that matters; it's the intensity with which you apply your taste that will cause the resulting work of art to feel highly organized.

The contractor's performance was described in terms of what he could do, Yashka's in terms of what he caused his listeners to feel.

Too often, to speak is to "get it wrong.

After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

Mentre [il lettore] legge, la sua esistenza si accorcia. La sua lettura è un anello nella catena di continuità nella rappresentazione del testo che sottoscrive la sopravvivenza del testo letto.

Leggiamo il libro ma, più profondamente, è il libro a leggere noi.

George Steiner

de la que tienen sus académicos colegas. Para éstos, Lévi-Strauss es una máquina de hilar fantasías efectistas.