Quotes about Interpretation

But I had read all of [the Bible] by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

The] Christ story is one of the best stories that man has invented. . . . Faulkner in the University, 117

Father said you swallow like you had a fishbone in your throat...

I'd have to listen to somebody - artist or shoe clerk. And the artist is more entertaining because he knows less about what he is trying to do.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

What's in a book is not what the author put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR the other. It was as if one should say My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.

a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.