Quotes about Interpretation

If I go out and do a set, there's a good chance that I'll watch another comedian. I'll think - not necessarily their words, but oftentimes the message that's behind the words - the sort of belief that their unspokenly advocating, well, sometimes that's offensive.

On one level, all of the characters in 'Game of Thrones' grow out of George R.R. Martin's imagination. Therefore they are his. As long as they are in the novels they are his. But the moment they step forth onto the TV screen, they become filtered through the showrunners. In a business sense, it's the same way with comics.

The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often difficult to interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

By the way, is there any difference between 'grey' and 'gray'? I believe there is, but I don't know what it is. In one place in the poem Smithers suggests 'gray'. In others he leaves 'grey'. Perhaps he is seeing red. I believe they are sympathetic colours in spectroscope investigations.