Quotes About Interpretation

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

We are accustomed to think of events as a sequence of facts: one set of facts follows another in a never-ending chain. When a situation has thinking participants, the chain does not lead directly from fact to fact. It links a fact to the participants' thinking and then connects the participants' thinking to the next set of facts.

Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or 'un-say' the world, to image and speak it otherwise. In that capacity in its biological and social evolution, may lie some of the clues to the question of the origins of human speech and the multiplicity of tongues. It is not, perhaps, 'a theory of information' that will serve us best in trying to clarify the nature of language, but a 'theory of misinformation'.

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.

It is not the literal past that rules us: it is images of the past.

The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.

Como nunca antes, el estudiante y la persona interesada por la literatura lee comentarios y críticas de libros más que los propios libros, o antes de esforzarse por formarse un juicio personal.

The truth is, you can find almost anything in the Bible to latch onto if you are really determined.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean.

It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words .

Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

In art there is only one thing that counts; the thing you can't explain.

You may give all the explanations you like, but your painting makes me feel as if you were trying to make us eat cotton waste and wash it down with kerosene.

I]n the face of every image we have to choose whether, or how, to make it participate in our knowledge and action. We can accept or reject this or that image; take it as a consoling object or as a worrying object; make it ask questions or use it as a ready-made response.

Some say they see poetry in my paintings I see only science.

Everything always comes down to language in the end.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way — things I had no words for.

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at—not copy it.

Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way- things I had no words for.

I got half-a-dozen paintings from that shattered plate.

It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.