Quotes About Interpretation

I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

You need to express things stronger today, more so than in the Baroque time, and you need to expand the expressiveness of the instrument.

It took me a long time to stop thinking that someone else knew what a great painting was. I was never sure.

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer them, or turn them into literature.

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons  attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles

Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existance.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

NOTICE Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR Per G.G.,Chief of Ordnance

I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it have gone and done it. So there ain't no doubt but there is something in that thing. That is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind.

I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand.

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of you imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there.

My works are like water. The works of the great masters are like wine. But everyone drinks water. - From Mark Twain's Notebook, 1885

S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoo-franzy - what would you think?

The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible. –Mark Twain

Expression, expression is the thing - in art. I do not care what it expresses, and I cannot most always sometimes tell, generally, but expression is what I worship, it is what I glory in, with all my impetuous nature.

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there.

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.

Mark Twain. The truth should never be permitted to stand in the way of a good story.