Quotes About Meaning

What's 'Atlanta' about? Technically, it's about a couple guys who are friends, but to me, 'Atlanta' is about black lives. I'm getting a real look at what black life means in Atlanta.

Lyrics mean a lot to me, and I won't record a song unless I can feel it. That's something I learned from Carter Stanley. Even when he wasn't perfect technically, he got inside a song and sold it emotionally.

To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me.

To me, the technique was almost irrelevant; it was what was coming across.

Let's define listening as making meaning from sound. It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction. We use some pretty cool techniques to do this. One of them is pattern recognition.

My approach goes way beyond simply ingredients and techniques. Every dish has to have a story.

A few things I've noticed about myself as a listener, and the music that I relate to and the music that's continued to mean something to me since I was a little kid or a teenager, is that they're songs that tell stories and songs that come from a place of experience.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

If you want to communicate something, you'd better make sure that your design piece is well-dressed and that its teeth are fixed. At the same time, I still believe that if it is only stylistically great and it has nothing to say, it still is not going to make a lasting impression on anybody.

What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don't really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don't you?

After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body's way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn't meant to be.

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.

I like to interpret 'Call me a River', as if I'm saying, 'Now you're telling me you love me after all that, and I'm telling you to shove off.' That's my interpretation. But I would never 'say' that because somebody else might interpret the song in another way.

You can be very honest without telling the truth, at least in art.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different.

Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

I have something inside of me that every day tells me that nature and beauty is the soul, the meaning, of our life. And I also love Hollywood and cinema.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

A shot is only as every as good as how well it tells the story.

I'm always looking for something that tells me a little bit about what it means to be human. That's how I measure the success of any artistic endeavor.