Quotes About Interpretation

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper. (pp.28-29)

Now, perhaps, we are in a better position to understand the abyss separating Sabina and Franz: he listened eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear the story of his, but although they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them.

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)

characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.

En el mismo comienzo del Génesis está escrito que Dios creó al hombre para confiarle el dominio sobre los pájaros, los peces y los animales. Claro que el Génesis fue escrito por un hombre y no por un caballo. No hay seguridad alguna de que Dios haya confiado efectivamente al hombre el dominio de otros seres. Más bien parece que el hombre inventó a Dios para convertir en sagrado el dominio sobre la vaca y el caballo, que había usurpado.

Dictionary of Misunderstood Words

The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded.

Mientras que las personas son jóvenes y la composición musical de su vida está aún en los primeros compases, pueden escribirla juntas e intercambiarse motivos, pero cuando se encuentran y ya son mayores, sus composiciones musicales están más o menos cerradas y cada palabra, cada objeto significa una cosa distinta en la composición de la una y en la de la otra

dictionary with unsaid words

Tomas ne savait pas, alors, que les métaphores sont une chose dangereuse. On ne badine pas avec les métaphores. L'amour peut naître d'une seule métaphore.

What remains of Beethoven? A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning Es muss seine! ….And so n and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into Kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

A person finds it distasteful to hear his life recounted with a different interpretation from his own.

The different arts reach our brains in different ways; they lodge there with differing ease, at different speeds, with different degrees of inevitable simplifications; and for different durations

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far-off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding

Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.

Numai întâmplarea ne poate ap?rea ca un mesaj. Tot ce se petrece ca o necesitate, tot ce e de aÈ™teptat È™i se repet? zi de zi nu-i decât un lucru mut. Numai întâmplarea ne spune ceva. Iar noi ne str?duim s? citim în ea, aÈ™a cum citesc È›ig?ncile în figurile desenate de zaÈ›ul cafelei pe fundul ceÈ™tii.

There is nothing harder to explain than humor.