Quotes About Interpretation

When your attitude is right, the facts don't matter, because what you think are facts are mostly opinions.

We'd created meaning where there was none, but, I don't know, isn't that art? Or at least I think it's the kind of art that I like, where the obsession of one person envelops other people, transforms them.

When I woke up, Carl was standing over me, his hand lightly resting on his cheek, like I was abstract art, like he saw something that interested him but he wasn't sure what it meant, like he thought I was something a child could have made.

Criticism is like dissecting a dead frog," Caleb said when the book was published. "They're examining all the guts and shit and organs, when the thing that really matters, whatever it was that animated the body, has long since left. It does nothing for the art.

She had tried for months now to think of her own performance, some unique revelation of the absurdity of life, but she had no capacity for new ideas. She could see an existing artwork and understand why it was or was not successful. But she could not take that knowledge and arrange it into something wholly original, or even a reinterpretation of that existing piece. She was, as Hobart had explained to her, as kindly as possible, simply a critic.

Reading other people's code is particularly hard. Not necessarily because other people's code is bad, but because they probably think and solve problems in a different way to you.

An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper.

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Which earth will bear me and which sky will protect me if I say anything by my personal opinion in interpreting the Qur'?n.

Love is an elusive concept and means different things to different people.

We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so..We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread.

Humans assign words to things and pretend the words are adequate.

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implications outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

Fluxus explored art as a process, using the viewer, or the audience, to complete the work. It asked, What can art be?

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see -- to see correctly -- and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.

You should draw not what the thing looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing…Gesture has no precise edges, no forms. The forms are in the act of changing. Gesture is movement in space.

Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as something related to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannot separate technique from expression. There is only expression.

To render the kings and higher nobility still more exclusive, they had a court language which was understood only by themselves, and which was changed in part from time to time as its expressions found interpretation beyond the royal circle. Some portions of this court language have been preserved.

Old creature with a sore leg (reference to Elizabeth I- he was incorrectly told she limped because of a varicose vein)

The newspaper fits the readers program while the listener must fit the broadcasters program.

We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.