"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. "
— Susan Sontag

"The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together. "
— Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game)

"A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology."
— George MacDonald (The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories)

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."
— John Locke

"All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place."
— Edward W. Said

"The pianokeys are black and white
but they sound like a million colors in your mind

- From "Spiders web""
— Maria Cristina Mena

"I have forgotten my umbrella. "
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people."
— Jean Giono (An Italian Journey)

"It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence."
— Samuel Butler (Erewhon Revisited)

"Theologians and other clerks,
You won't understand this book,
-- However bright your wits --
If you do not meet it humbly,
And in this way, Love and Faith
Make you surmount Reason, for
They are the protectors of Reason's house. "
— Marguerite Porete

"Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. "
— Susan Sontag (Against Interpretation: And Other Essays)

"[...] it is safer to wander without a guide through an unmapped country than to trust completely a map traced by men who came only as tourists and often with biased judgement. "
— Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (Gods and Heroes of the Celts)