Quotes About Interpretation

maybe we were the diggers of literature

You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true.

Some Heisenberg principle frustrates critics who try to analyze how stories are written. Whatever they can analyze has to be dead before it can be dissected.

Money is a kind of poetry.

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last,To understand, as if to know becameThe fatality of seeing things too well.

Poetry is the subject of the poem.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

They said"You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are". The man replied,"things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar".

From oriole to crow, note the decline In music. Crow is realist. But, then, Oriole, also, may be realist.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

They said, "You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

All history is modern history.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.