Quotes About Interpretation

Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them.

We did a play of 'Frog and Toad' at my elementary school. And I'm not sure if this is part of the book or it was something that we made up on our own, but I auditioned to play the black hole, which somehow makes sense to me.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

From where many of us in the U.K. sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn't see things in this horribly oversimplified way.

The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.

In the past, art was admired and revered from afar. Today, there is more of an interactive relationship between the art and the person who admires it.

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.

You learn to control every aspect of your muscles, your face, your toes, your fingernails. And that is how you tell a story, through movement.

The image people have of comedians staring defiantly over a stationary line of good taste is simply inaccurate. We don't approach this line, put our toes over it arrogantly and then scamper back to safety. The line doesn't exist.

When I meet people, I relay things I see and feel. And in a reading when I interact with a person, I'll pick up on sensations and feelings and piece them together to make a coherent thought. My goal is to always get specific information and relay details that people will connect to.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Never give an artist like me carte blanche: he would think it's simply toilet paper.

In a sense, 'Schmidt' is the most Omaha of my films. But have I gotten it right? I'm not sure. Did Fellini get Rome right? Did Ozu get Tokyo right?

The way that one feels about the story line of 'Deterrence' can tell us, I believe, about each person's conservatism or liberalism and precisely how tolerant he or she is of racism.

There's lots of Tolkien that must be confusing to people.

Would you ask Picasso to explain 'Guernica?' Would you ask Nabokov to explain 'Lolita?' Would you ask Tolstoy about 'War and Peace?' No, you wouldn't dare.

I should explain — in view of my last letter, you may find it slightly surprising — that Daphne and I are now bosom friends. That is to say, she seems to think we are; and I do not feel that I know her well enough to dispute it.

Art, Eliot wrote, is a guide to perception. It shows us how to look—or where to look—and then leaves us, as Virgil left Dante, to go beyond where the guide can take us.

most art mistakes itself for the universal when it is momentary

What Is Art?150 I'm beginning to think that maybe I'm exceedingly vulgar — and the funny thing about it is — I don't understand — I get the shapes in my head — can never make them exactly like I want to — but there is a fascination about trying — And then too — there is the delicious probability that I don't know anything about what Art is — So it's fun to make the stuff —

There is always half a truth in cliche.