Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can.

Compliments and criticism are all ultimately based on some form of projection.

Appointments' is largely just derived from pieces of dialogue with another person, and then also what's going on inside of my own mind, or a person's own mind. They're intended to be a little bit exaggerated and a satire of things that we're not sure are entirely true, or maybe biased.

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

To a critic, no explanation will do. To a fan, no explanation is needed.

Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.

Revelation: a famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed all that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing.

You’ve never reacted to someone else. You project meaning onto nothing. And you react to the meaning you’ve projected

You only see what your eyes want to see. How can life be what you want it to be?

I think everyone does selective reading. Everybody has a filter, and that is real easy for critics to see things from their perspectives, and I'm going, I didn't mean that at all. And believers do the same.

Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art.

Observations always involve theory.

We are better able to study our neighbours than ourselves, and their actions than our own.

All I really know in nonfiction is that when I come home, I've got all these notes and I'm trying to figure out what actually happened to me. I usually kind of know what happened, but as you work through the notes, you find that certain scenes write well and some don't even though they should. Those make a constellation of meaning that weirdly ends up telling you what you just went through. It's a slightly different process, but still there's mystery because when you're bearing down on the scenes, sometimes you find out they mean something different than what you thought.

Above all, it behooves us to repress, and if possible to extinguish once and for all, our inveterate tendency to judge others by the extent to which they contrive to be like ourselves.

If you always feel comfortable reading God's Word, you're either not reading ALL of it, or you aren't letting it sink in.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.

I felt it's vague enough for the reader to pull their own story and their wisdom out of the poem, but for me, it's actually very painfully transparent what I've written. Sometimes very literal, which is scary.

(Art is) the residue of vision.

Some people, no matter where they look, they see themselves.

If you are a conscious human being who has opinions about the world, then you will unconsciously put your own perspective into the book.

[ Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac] was the greatest commentator [of the Bible] we ever had.

When a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime.

I am not a monster. I'm not all bad. Maybe 10 percent. I think I'm 90 percent good.