Quotes About Interpretation

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

I look at a lot of artists. I'm inspired by - I suppose I shouldn't say 'inspired,' but it's not really influenced. I am inspired. Art comes from art.

I suppose I just like being arty. That's all. Arty.

It's different being a director. I suppose, especially if it's a story you've written and you feel compelled to tell, in some ways it's a lot easier than acting because you're orchestrating the piece. As an actor, sometimes you're trying to second-guess what people want.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

You have to write a good score that you feel good about. At least, you're supposed to. But, if the director hates it, it ain't going to be in the movie!

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.

In art, at a certain level, there is no 'better than.' It's just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

If you don't have any Coltrane, 'A Love Supreme' will do it for you. It will explain everything. Even if you don't get it, it will still explain everything. That's how deep it is.

Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so.

Just because a majority of the Supreme Court declares something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so.

What many people, I think, don't really understand is how much their rights really turn on the interpretation of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court overrules, distinguishes, and upholds prior precedents. Sometimes it ignores them. But it does not - cannot - 'defy' them.

Stability in law - particularly constitutional law - is critically important; the Supreme Court would do well to remember that.

The Supreme Court should interpret the law, not make the law.

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

The picture which the philosopher draws of the world is surely not one in which every stroke is necessitated by pure logic.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

Works of art are like a Trojan horse. Under the surface is always some artist's deeply held philosophy on their view of the world. But on the other hand, you do not want to make it feel like medicine. You do not want to make it feel like an afternoon TV special where you're trying to hammer a message into someone's head.