Quotes About Interpretation

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Kill?' I realized I could never properly explain that word to this creature toiling here in its garden. Had it ever eaten meat? Could it conjugate the verb 'hunt?

A nation can assume that the phrase "under God" in its Pledge of Allegiance shows that its citizens believe in God when all it really shows is that they believe in believing in God.

Symbolism is the science of understanding the relations between the multiple levels of reality.

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.

I believe firmly... that science can never contradict true religion, and that if they seem at variance, then that is due to our faulty understanding of one or the other. God gave us the Bible and he gave us nature to show his creation; it is absurd to think he might contradict himself. It is man who fails.

I painted not what I saw but how you wished to be seen.

there's reason to believe neither account reflects the facts. But the authors of both gospels—whoever those authors really were—believed Jesus was the Savior, so He must've been born in Bethlehem, as the Old Testament predicts.

His intelligence was relentless and wild, a fire even he couldn't control. It swallowed entire books at a sitting, finding flaws in arguments, gaps in evidence, errors in interpretation, in objects, far from his own.

She explained to me later that she must have been possessed by a subconscious desire to be raped. Well she found me in the mountains and she was raped - by me.

but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape.

There is only one way of telling if a woman really loves you, and even that way can only be read by an expert.' 'Yes,' said Bond dubiously. 'I know what you mean. In bed.

When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word — the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different.

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.

He found and praised Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat . I said I found it too schematic and preferred The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . He nodded, but not in agreement, it seemed, more like a therapist who now understood my problem.

Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.

the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

And it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained.

Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.

My pleasure in reading is not necessarily the witnessing of something new, but of something familiar which I haven't seen described.

Now I must listen again to Claude's set piece on menu terms, as if he's the first ever to spot these unimportant absurdities. He lingers on "pan-fried." What is pan but a deceitful benediction on the vulgar and unhealthy fried?