183 Quotes About Interpretation

When you’ve been given a curse of perspective you don’t stop to consider the gift of oversight that most humans have been bestowed with.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

The Artwork as MisunderstandingThere is a crisis with regard to Representation. They are looking for Meaning as if it was a thing. As if it was a girl, required to take her panties off as if she would want to do so, as soon as the true interpreter comes along. As if there was something to take off.

I write about my own work because I want to speak for myself. I might not be the only authority, nor the best authority, but I want to participate in the writing of my own history. Why should artists be validated by outside authorities. I don't like being paternalism and colonised by every Tom, Dick or Harry that comes along (male or female).

Surely we can take anything we want from anything, but to interpret a work as whatever we’d like is to fill in someone’s careful recipe with all of our old ingredients. You can still eat it, but you’ll always wonder why every new thing tastes the same.

There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.

I don’t want my poems to mean one thing.I want them to mean many different things to many different people.Freedom of interpretation.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.