Quotes About Interpretation

Así, en una época en que las religiones tradicionales se han visto sometidas al fuego abrasador de la ciencia, ¿no es natural envolver a los antiguos dioses y demonios en un atuendo científico y llamarlos extraterrestres?

The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie.

Presumably no one would argue that the conservative view on the sum of 14 and 27 differs from the liberal view

If scientists can be fooled on the question of the simple interpretation of straightforward data of the sort that they are routinely obtaining from other kinds of astronomical objects, when the stakes are high, when the emotional predispositions are working, what must be the situation where the evidence is much weaker, where the will to believe is much greater, where the skeptical scientific tradition has hardly made a toehold - namely, in the area of religion?

Whether we believe in God depends very much on what we mean by God.

I have a poet's weakness for symbols.

Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare.

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.

Thus, I am here where poets come to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice, something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.

There is no objective scale by which to measure truth when that truth is not written down.

People are strange creatures, and they don't always have a clear eye toward how things stand.

A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately.

That one can understand The Waste Land without even trying is consoling news for all students of literature.

It is said that an eighteenth-century bishop who read Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels threw the book into the fire, indignantly declaring that he didn't believe a word of it. He obviously thought that the story was meant to be true, but suspected that it was invented. Which, of course, is just what it is. The bishop was dismissing the fiction because he thought it was fiction.

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end. This dreary-sounding definition, unpoetic to a fault, may well turn out to be the best we can do.

Literary figures have no pre-history. It is said that a theatre director who was staging one of Harold Pinter's plays asked the playwright for some hints as to what his characters were up to before they came on stage. Pinter's reply was 'Mind your own fucking business.

It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable.

Poetry is concerned not just with the meaning of experience, but with the experience of meaning.

meanings are neither randomly bestowed by readers, nor objectively there on the page in the sense that a watermark is.

The work of art had nothing as vulgar as a social purpose.

To relate a Beethoven sonata to the testicles is hardly in the style of traditional aesthetics.

What Wittgenstein calls a 'grammar' is a set of rules by which we are able to make sense of things; and such grammars are not correlated with reality. It is not as though some of them provide us with a more accurate representation

The most uninspired form of criticism simply tells the story of a work in different words. Some students imagine they are writing criticism when for the most part they are simply paraphrasing a text, occasionally throwing in the odd comment of their own.