Quotes About Interpretation

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Tenía la mala costumbre de asumir lo que otras personas harían o lo que haría ella en su lugar.

Leave it to you to marry a psycho." He looked startled. Then his shoulders relaxed. "Yeah, well, takes one to know one, right?" "So they say.

Stories are thick with meanings. You can fall in love with a story for what you think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first. People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.

though I said to Harry that I didn't know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John—

The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth.

Dutch Bill took politeness on my part for something else and asked to marry

different way. He's into random splotches.

Life is so full of portents and signs and symbols that it's a wonder not everyone is a writer.

The pieces don't fit perfectly together and don't tell the whole story. Only the viewer can say if I succeeded.

Great beauty is often perceived by human senses as pain.

Wars are caused by misperceptions—one country interpreting the behavior of another in the most threatening terms—as much as by actual conflicts of interest. The risk of misperceptions between China and the United States is heightened because we live in a unipolar world in which the power gap between the dominant power, the United States, and other countries is the largest it has ever been in world history.

If there's one thing you respect, it's coincidences. They never are and never will be just coincidences. They're shining neon signs, and you gotta read the signs.

I think literature reveals more about us than history does.

They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter.

History matters. Facts matter. But above all else, context matters. Changing history and facts—canceling them as if they did not exist or changing them to suit some twenty-first-century weaponized truism is another form of propaganda and lie.

language helps create our reality.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible -- determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders...