Quotes About Interpretation

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. - Susan Sontag

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it and still being good.

Something is neutral only with respect to something else—like an intention or an expectation.

El contenido puede haber cambiado. Quizá sea ahora menos figurativo, menos lúcidamente realista. Pero aún se supone que una obra de arte es su contenido. O, como suele afirmarse hoy, que una obra de arte, por definición, dice algo («X dice que...», «X intenta decir que...», «Lo que X dijo...», etcétera, etcétera).

Cuando deciden la apariencia de una imagen, cuando prefieren una exposición a otra, los fotógrafos siempre imponen pautas a sus modelos. Aunque en un sentido la cámara en efecto captura la realidad, y no solo la interpreta, las fotografías son una interpretación del mundo tanto como las pinturas y los dibujos.

To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.

The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: 'There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.

Whether the photograph is understood as a naïve object or the work of an experienced artificer, its meaning—and the viewer's response—depends on how the picture is identified or misidentified; that is, on words.

She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.

Reproducing nature slavishly is not art.

painting. Carefully, I took down the goat, the chicken, and me and

Has it ever occurred to you that to clutch at life fearfully, unwilling to spend it, is not a form of gratitude to God for life?" Lizzie looked at her as if pained by some bright light. "But to fling one's whole being at a goal of interpreting God's creation—

We often say that life imitates art, but sometimes, art also infiltrates life.

There was no point in questioning her version of the story.

One person's weed is another person's wildflower. ~

Unfortunately, Childermass's French was so strongly accented by his native Yorkshire that Minervois did not understand and asked Strange if Childermass was Dutch.

With characteristic exuberance Tom named this curiously constructed house Castel des Tours saunz Nowmbre, which means the Castle of Innumerable Towers. David Montefiore had counted the innumerable towers in 1764. There were fourteen of them.

He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

Pen, ink, and paper are cold vehicles for the marvellous, and a "reader" decidedly a more critical animal than a "listener.

How easily men satisfy themselves that the Constitution is exactly what they wish it to be

He felt that the job was not particularly hazardous physically but was incredibly hazardous emotionally and too often led to divorce, alcoholism, and suicide. No, policemen were not danger lovers, they were seekers of the awesome, the incredible, even the unspeakable in human experience. Never mind whether they could interpret, never mind if it was potentially hazardous to the soul. To be there was the thing.

A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind.

She used to be a mathematician. Now she looks for omens and signs. At one time she thought math would clarify the world for her. She knew her link to real things was weak [...] She had hoped knowledge of mathematics, the world's rules, might strengthen her hold. But it did not. The world turned opaque and medieval, its every event mysterious. Now she uses a private mathematics, one made from omens and signs and dreams.