Quotes About Interpretation

Generally speaking, we respond to others' way of being toward us rather than to their behavior.

We judge one another by our outward actions, but in the motive underlying those actions our judgment may be widely at fault. Preoccupied by our own private interpretation of the matter, we can see only the one possible motive behind the action, so that our solution may be quite plausible, quite coherent, and quite wrong.

JUSTINE: Is the story supposed to be jumping around like that, from Mary's head, to Diana's, to Beatrice's?

Although the whole earth, not we alone, is moved by passions hymeneal, and everything terrestrial has come into being by the one common road, yet there is that ridiculous tendency to close the eyes and turn away the head as if there were something unclean in nature itself. "Conceived in iniquity and born in sin," is the unnatural interpretation put upon the process by the extreme religionist, and the world, by its silence

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

We are now in a position to determine just what sort of science fiction story this really is.

Si jamais quelqu'un était capable de retracer exactement ce qu'il voit et ressent en faisant seulement dix mètres dans la rue, nous obtiendrions une image si déformée, si obscure, tellement subjective qu'il est difficile de s'en faire une idée, même vague. Et personne ne regarde jamais autour de soi avec attention, jusqu'au moment où il vient ici.

Such a statement may well represent Sturgeon's own key to working. But there is no necessity for it to be my key into the work.

The way we perceive the world around us depends entirely on our way of looking at it.

The people who wrote down the Bible and the people who wrote down the Mahayana sutras were artists. They used images to express their insights.

You know, I've read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' about fifteen times.

I have a journal, and every character that I play, I write as the character: how I feel about things and how I'm going to play it.

You can construct whatever story you want to. Documentaries are constructions, as is all journalism.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.

Most people have just heard Joy Division on record. And Joy Division on record was completely different than it was live.

James Joyce actually is rewarding you in all of these incredible ways.

What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.

If you word-spot James Joyce, you'll miss the entire experience.

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

It's difficult to judge other actors, because as an actor you're looking at different things than what an audience is looking at.

So you can't judge the character you're playing ever.

When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.

You can't really judge characters, because that's when it gets really hard to play them.