Context Loss Quotes

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.

Tumblr culture and the whole reappropriation-without-context thing are a double-edged sword in that they both raise awareness of my work and also kind of devalue it at the same time.

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.

Journalists have misquoted people for so long–and quoted them out of context–that many people like to have their words on record [in writing]. I don’t want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me… Just too much risk.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Most of my critics don't even listen to me; they are clueless. They just go to Web sites that report what I say out of context.

With no more than six levels of misquotation, any statement can be made to say whatever you wish.

The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it.

That's the problem with the Internet: You do a naked scene and then it's taken out of context and put on websites that have nothing to do with film.

I speculate that the genesis of the chicken-joke lies in some situation such as the one illustrated above, but over time the original context of the joke was lost, which left the chicken sadly decontextualized.

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

The media loves to take things like that [Rocky Marciano couldn't hold my jockstrap] out of context. There was no harm meant when I said that, but plenty of harm came from it.

Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.

Sometimes one can be so closely involved with things that the larger context is lost to view.

I don't want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me... Just too much risk.

The dark side of social media is that, within seconds, anything can be blown out of proportion and taken out of context. And it's very difficult not to get swept up in it all.

I'm constantly playing this game in my head where I'm thinking, 'Can this quote be pared down and misinterpreted?' It doesn't matter what outlet I'm talking to and how comprehensive the interview is, because I have to think in terms of, 'Right, but 'People' magazine could just take this one quote and take it out of context.'

Online, your quotes can now be picked up around the world, twisted, translated, and interpreted to mean the opposite of what you have actually said.

Headlines are so great in a sense that they can take a little bit from an article completely out of context and blow it into something it's not. Some people really only read headlines.

Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.

Things can be translated, but they become different.

Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

I meet young people who know me and are familiar with my stuff. They know the package. They might have cherry-picked five or six key tunes. That's how it seems to work. I sometimes wonder if they realise they are not getting the whole context.

Such do not always understand the authors whose names adorn their barren pages, and which are taken, too, from the third or the thirtieth hand. Those who trust to such false quoters will often learn how contrary this transmission is to the sense and application of the original. Every transplantation has altered the fruit of the tree; every new channel, the quality of the stream in its remove from the spring-head.

TheIinternet is a timeless void - you put something in there, and it's there forever and loses a lot of context.