Quotes About Interpretation

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

I am convinced it is a mistake to find an artist human outside his work. If you cannot find him human in and through his work, you are better not to know it when you come to formulate an opinion of his public value.

When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

A dictionary should be descriptive, not prescriptive.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Dictionaries are like watches. The worst is better than none at all and even the best cannot be expected to run quite true.

A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

If Ford Madox Ford were placed stark naked in a room totally empty he would contrive to turn it into a mess.

Some say, compared to Bononcini, That Mynheer Handel's but a ninny; Others aver, that he to Handel Is scarcely fit to hold a candle: Strange all this difference should be, 'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

I am a choreographer. A choreographer is a poet. I do not create. God creates. I assemble, and I will steal from everywhere to do it.

What a blessed thing it is that nature, when she invented, manufactured and patented her audiors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

To many people dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.

The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

When a diplomat says yes he means perhaps; when he says perhaps he means no; when he says no he is no diplomat.

Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

What a man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm.

When every one is in the wrong, every one is in the right.

Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.