interpretive significance Quotes

Songs are like myths. Myths are useful because they allow you to cast yourself and your life and your own experience. And for some people, 'Fire and Rain' speaks to them in that way.

It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is.

The meaning ... of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.

There remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity that can speak, whether it's through beauty, or through ugliness, or whatever quality you put into the work. The work doesn't have to be a transparent vehicle for you to say things about life today.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

In the end I realize that whatever meaning that picture has is the accumulated meaning of ten thousand brushstrokes, each one being decided as it was painted.