Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes

I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

I have learnt through doing interviews throughout my life that the way that somebody can write about something can change entirely how it was meant, or what actually happened.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

The truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant.

Yet it was very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from his meaning.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Everyone gets meaning in different ways.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

I don't really like over-explaining the songs. Everyone constantly asks what the songs are about, and I think the thing is that the songs definitely all have stories in them; it's just nice to let people decide what they are. I think it's important that people hear it themselves rather than having me annotate it.

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.

When you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions, you get transmutations, and that's much more interesting in the long run.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

Everyone only hears what he understands.

How was I to know? ... You didn't say anything.""I said lots of things," he corrected gently. "You just didn't hear them.

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the reader's frame of mind.

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

Cut the pie any way you like, "meanings" just ain't in the head!

I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or it was taken wrong. And now it's all this.