Quotes About Interpretation

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

You make a movie that is about what you want it to be about and let people have their reaction to it.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

In my pictures, you never know, that's the mystery. It's just a suggestion and you leave it to the audience to put what they want on it. It's fashion in disguise.

In film, other actors' performances really are not your concern. If the other actor isn't giving you what you want, act as though he were.

Robotic correctness is the last thing judges want to see or hear

As with good history, good psychoanalytic interpretations must also make sense, pull together as much of the known data as possible, provide a coherent and persuasive account, and also facilitate personal growth. Psychoanalytic

Interpretations, like the sculptor's chisel, would be used to target and then chip away at the imprisoning defenses, exposing the patient's inner psychic reality. This inner psychic reality, essentially driven by pleasure-seeking fantasy, pulled the patient away from facing what Freud had referred to as "the brick wall of reality" that would challenge unacceptable fantasies and free the entangled energy for more realistic projects.

The optimist says the glass is half full. The pessimist says the glass is half empty. The engineer says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

It's often not the message that's sent that causes offence but the one that is received.

Our conceptions of the world affect our perceptions of the world which, in turn, condition the way we subsequently conceive the world.

Kanal' means 'sewer' as well as 'channel'. 'Kanakafü' has echoes of 'Kacke', a baby word for faeces.

As Chen explained, the Chinese fossils turn Darwin's tree of life "upside down.

She was looking at me as if I was a painting too, to be examined for symbols and meaning, and she couldn't decide in the end if I really was just a mass of pointless daubs

This is probably the most annoying thing of all to the French. Not only do we pronounce the battles incorrectly (Crécy should be 'Cray-see' and Waterloo 'Watt-air-loh'), with Agincourt ('Ah-zan-coor') we even get the spelling wrong.

Do not follow others," Corot exhorted. "He who follows is always behind. You must interpret Nature with entire simplicity and according to your personal sentiment, altogether detaching yourself from what you know of the old masters or of contemporaries. Only in this way will you do work of real feeling.

Gerald B. Kauvar. The Other Poetry of Keats. Associated University Press: Cranbury, New Jersey, 1969

God knows nothing we don't know. We gave him every word he ever said.

When people praise a poem that I can't understand I always think they're lying.

The Frankfurt School was profoundly mistaken in thinking that the Enlightenment—or, better, its scientific rationality—should be interpreted as triumphant or in isolation from the theory and practice of its rivals. Enlightenment thinking has always been on the defensive. That remains the case.

Isn't that what fairy tales are, anyway? What we tell ourselves about ourselves, just in an indirect way, with elves and magic and monsters to make it all safe?

It's from George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher from the first part of the twentieth century. He also famously said that history is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren't there.

People always talk about unreli­able narrators and, to tell you the truth, I think that's a redundant term. I think 'narrator' inheres unreliability, because even if we don't mean to lie, we're still selecting this event instead of that event to talk about, and that's a form of omission. Anyone who narrates a story, or narrates anything, is always giving you their version, and their version always has a slant to it.

The sensory stimuli we encounter do not, in and of themselves, except under unusual circumstances determine whether or not we pay attention to them; we, ourselves, do. In fact novel stimuli of great intensity (which usually are not gated) will be gated if they do not conform to the nature of expected sensory inputs.