Quotes About Meaning

You always hear rappers say they don't write, but they're not really talking about anything.

Rappers tend to use words sometimes that just rhyme and don't really mean nothing.

A great speech can make you remember something about what you believe, about who you are, about who you want to be. It's rare when that kind of thing happens. But it is important, and it is real.

I think a good script is a rare thing, and I think no matter who you are you have to fight for the good ones.

There are some times when I think acting can be a noble profession. And when those rare roles come along, like 'Down to the Bone,' you have the opportunity to be of service.

Everyone calls himself a friend, but only a fool relies on it; nothing is commoner than the name, nothing rarer than the thing.

I'm a Sagittarius, born in the year of the rat, all of which is basically meaningless to me.

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

It's a rather rude gesture, but at least it's clear what you mean.

We have no rational evidence that there exists another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume.

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

So when you make a disaster movie that is trying to say something about our world, you reach for images that haunt you.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

I want to be able to say on my deathbed that I reached a few people. That would be very nice, just to be able to say that.

When I see people that are my age and reaching 50, the ones that are really sparkly and full of joy are the ones that are committed to something bigger than themselves.

We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act.

Lyrics have become so dumbed down nowadays. People don't want to have to think about lyrics anymore, they just want to be told something. Until these great things started happening with us, I'd really given up on reaching people like that.

It's not always about reaching the widest audience. It's about how you reach people, and in that sense, there's no difference between a little room in a back basement with ten people if you hit them hard enough, there's a nobility to reaching ten people. They are not irrelevant because they are less than 10,000.

All my books are accidental books - they come from reacting to things and thinking about things and engaging in a real way. They are not about, 'Oh, did it get a good review in the Guardian?' I don't care.

There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me - but 'ick' means something.

I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.