Information consists of differences that make a difference.
Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does
Music can bring about different vibes on the field, off the field, urban life, going to church, leaving church. Everything the world may bring, there's a song for it to put you in the right frame of mind.
Before 2000, everything was about being contextual, and buildings were supposed to be good citizens.
Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.
No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.
Something that can be so vital at one point can be inconsequential at another. I'm just intrigued by that phenomenon.
Titles are too "thin" for the nineteenth century.
There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.
Everybody brings their thing to their criticism. I bring this wealth of opinions and feeling and knowledge about race and gender and sexuality. I feel like I have it, I may as well express it, and if it's applicable to what I'm writing about and I'm not forcing it, I should try to use it, because it's interesting. It speaks to more than some people.
All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
When I say it doesn't make much difference, I mean in terms of the importance of the piece of literature.
Whether you're eighteen or sixty, in a certain way, whatever you know is valid.
The design of a restaurant should embrace the identity of the chef, the nature of the cuisine, and the context of the restaurant itself.
You don't have to worry about being a number one, number two, or number three. Numbers don't have anything to do with placement. Numbers only have something to do with repetition.
We cannot just ape the west. What may be good in an alien country may be unpalatable in India.
So where in the old economy, content was king, in the new economy, context is king.
A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.
Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.
Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.
Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.
An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.
A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.
Circumstances alter cases.
