Quotes About Interpretation

OUR ORDINATION: Sir Isaac Newton, 1642 – 1747 About the times of the End, a body of men will be raised up who will turn their attention to the prophecies, and insist upon their literal interpretation, in the midst of much clamor and opposition.

Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

If I cannot sing a work, I cannot conduct it.

Statistics are like a drunk with a lampost: used more for support than illumination.

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.

Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it.

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

Doesn't the seventeenth-century use of the measurement yard for penis strike you as a bit of an exaggeration, unless the yard then was not the yard now?

Un libro es producto de la colaboración entre el lector y el texto y, en el mejor de los casos, ese encuentro da lugar a una historia de amor como cualquier otra.

That's the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what's in front of you. Cézanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt." He stopped and smiled at me. "Because that's what we are sure of.

that 'now' you're talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it's impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present." I stroked his hair and paused. "I think I've always loved paintings for that reason. Somebody makes a canvas in time, but after it's made, a painting stays in the present.

You're saying that anything's art if people say it is? Even me?" "Exactly. It's perspective - not content.

Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.

Each had his own language for seeing, and that language created vision. We all inherit vision just as they did - two men who stood side by side but were nevertheless separated by and intellectual chasm.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.

but the story's interest lies in my struggle over semantics and the moral resonance of interpreting the meaning of a word.

Art is a reaching toward, a bid to be seen and understood and recognized by another. It involves a form of transference.

Without a viewer, a reader, a listener, art is dead. Something happens between me and it, an "it" that carries in itself another person's willed act, a thing suffused with another person's subjectivity, and in it I may feel pain, humor, sexual desire, discomfort. And that is why I don't treat artworks as I would treat a chair, but I don't treat them as a real person either.