Quotes About Interpretation

I wondher why ye can always read a doctor's bill an' ye niver can read his purscription.

The way I feel about music is that there is no right and wrong. Only true and false.

But I honestly don't read critics. My dad reads absolutely everything ever written about me. He calls me up to read ecstatic reviews, but I always insist that I can't hear them. If you give value to the good reviews, you have to give value to the criticism.

The last time I read piles of erotica by choice, I was fourteen. At that stage, having no experience with men beyond snogging, I took it all as gospel. Now, after I've lived a little, I read the same works again and think, 'Has this author ever really had sex?

consider the meaning of these images. Every time you're working with them, ask yourself: what do they mean? And, even more important, what do they mean to me? The more specific and personal something is, the more its universality emerges.

Asking my father to ask the waitress the definition of "sloppy Joe" or "Tater Tots" was no problem. His translations, however, were highly suspect.

It is this process of symbolization which, in certain hasheesh states, gives every tree and house, every pebble and leaf, every footprint, feature, and gesture, a significance beyond mere matter or form, which possesses an inconceivable force of tortures or of happiness.

By a fortunate dispensation of providence, Russians possess a natural gift of make-believe. ... For them, as for no other race, the real and the imaginary, the actual and the symbolic, the literal and the figurative, tend to overlap and become one.

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

But one does have to give words some credit. One has to at least pretend that they more or less resemble their meaning. Their shady meaning.

The fiction which resembles truth," said the Persian poet Nizâmi in the year 1250, "is better than the truth which is dissevered from the imagination";

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

Het moet trouwens toch maar eens afgelopen zijn met de 'moderniteit' in dit jaar - dat is zo'n rekbaar begrip, door tijdgenoten en latere generaties telkens anders geïnterpreteerd en door iedere generatie steeds weer in een ander tijdsgewricht geplaatst, dat het eigenlijk helemaal niet geschikt is om de ontzaglijke niet-gelijktijdige gelijktijdigheid die het jaar 1913 vooral kenmerkt naar behoren te schetsen.

None of us is fully able to perceive the truth that shines through another person's window, nor the falsehood that we may perceive as truth. Thus, we can easily mistake another's good for evil, and our own evil for good.

Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.

You know how easily things grow out of nothing, when they pass through a mouth that smears them all over and makes something else out of them—

Bach é um astrônomo, descobrindo as estrelas mais maravilhosas. Beethoven desafia o universo. Eu apenas tento expressar a alma e o coração do homem. Frédéric Chopin

From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary of phonetic spellings.

Si vous faîtes attention aux signes, quand donc ferez vous attention à ce qu'ils signifient? If you pay attention to the signs, but when will you pay attention to what they signify?

I never understood the meaning of a film. I am very concrete. I only understand what is on the screen. In my whole life, I have never understood a single symbol.

I warmly recommend to you the films of poets.

To clarify Rear Window, I'd suggest this parable: The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses. And Hitchcock? He is the man we love to be hated by.

The idea that individuals should collect evidence and decide for themselves was out of the question. Once Falwell told his congregation that to read anything but the Bible and certain prescribed works of interpretation was at best a waste of time.