A Quote by Neil MacGregor

Objects are better than text at conveying narrative

Neil MacGregor

Quote Topics

Better Conveying Narrative Objects Text Than

Quote Author

Neil MacGregor
British - Historian
Born: June 16, 1946

[I have a] way of making narrative sculpture, where first you make a text and out of that text you make objects. [...] I start with a story and then I make sculpture from that story, it's just that the stories become more and more elaborate.

Matthew Barney

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

Anne Carson

The other day I got a text from a boy, but it wasn't hot. I mean, if you're going to text me every day, you haven't seen me for months and you're trying to seduce me, you'd better spice up that text and make it more exciting than 'How was your day? I hope you're having a beautiful one.' Sadly, I haven't been doing a lot of kissing lately.

Chloe Sevigny

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

Roland Barthes

With Orff it is text, text, text - the music always subordinate. Not so with me. In 'Magnificat,' the text is important, but in some places I'm writing just music and not caring about text. Sometimes I'm using extremely complicated polyphony where the text is completely buried. So no, I am not another Orff, and I'm not primitive.

Krzysztof Penderecki

A pretty girl is better than a plain one. A leg is better than an arm. A bedroom is better than a living room. An arrival is better that a departure. A birth is better than a death. A chase is better than a chat. A dog is better than a landscape. A kitten is better than a dog. A baby is better than a kitten. A kiss is better than a baby. A pratfall is better than anything.

Preston Sturges

The structure underlying the phenomena is not given by material objects like the atoms of Democritus but by the form that determines the material objects. The Ideas are more fundamental than the objects.

Werner Heisenberg

We've clearly entered a period in which the analog of text is no longer important or relevant. All text will be electronic. I accept that fact. My house has thousands of books in it, and I've started to look at them completely differently. They now seem to me to be like antiquarian objects. Their use value has become negligible to me because I'm perfectly happy to read on an e-reader.

Will Self

Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.

Peter Greenaway

Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.

Neil MacGregor

There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.

Kenzaburo Oe

Self-denial is taught much better by inspiring the love of our neighbor, than by the prohibition of innocent comforts and pleasures. Spirituality is much better taught by making spiritual things the objects of supreme desire, than by commanding an ostentatious avoidance of the enjoyments of life.

Harriet Martineau

There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

Mark Twain

I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

Jeff Kinney

He who is well acquainted with the text of scripture, is a distinguished theologian. For a Bible passage or text is of more value than the comments of four authors.