I don't think culture is something you can describe.
Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else.
Sometimes it's nice to have a song that can be taken more then one way, so it can be interpreted differently.
Most of the songs that I appreciate are lyrically vague.
Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.
What we perceive things to be when they come out of our mouth is not what the listener perceives it to be. They think it differently. They're not your blood. They're not your mind. You get in an argument.
Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.
When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
Yet it was very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from his meaning.
It's like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because it's your mind that allows the words to come to life.
Art is not there simply to be understood. ... It is more the sense of an indication or suggestion.
What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.
A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways they're capable of understanding.
Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
The first time I read 'Leftovers,' I didn't get it at all.
A woman can tell me about her having a baby, but I'll never know what it is to have a baby.
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.
Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
I get the lyrics of a tune and interpret them my way.
Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. I'd say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there!
When I write the songs, I don't dictate how people should interpret them.
