Jonathan Miller Quotes

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Knowing about authors' beliefs helps you understand how those beliefs influence their writing, and things you thought meant one thing, once you've got enough information about that writer, you suddenly realize mean an entirely different thing. That makes a difference.

It took an entire generation of critical thinking for Douglas Sirk's films to be really appreciated.

The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

When people ask what 'American Pie' is about, they're missing the point. The song isn't about the lines themselves - it's about what is between the lines. The song is about what isn't there.

Art is supposed to hold up a mirror to its audience and ask, 'What do you believe? What do you think? What do you feel?' and if you look at a painting and it makes you feel nothing, that's a feeling as well.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

All I really want is for people to really get what I do and connect with the songs and find meaning in them.

Text without context is pretext.

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.

When I think about what part of my college experience came back in my work experience, I feel like it was learning how to read deeper, learning how to keep filling the movie up with more and more resonance.

We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

Everything means something.