Quotes About Interpretation

It's not uncommon for men to show up at my book signings or to send me emails with their thoughts about my books. I've also heard from a number of female readers who were introduced to my works by men in their lives.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

I certainly think, obviously, rhythm is a huge part of being an actor. It just is unconscious, to a degree, but particularly in comedy, rhythm is pretty essential, and there's probably something more physiological going on.

'Subliminal' is about how we misinterpret our behavior because we're unaware of what our unconscious minds are doing.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

Hypnosis is about shutting down the conscious mind and re-igniting the unconscious and the imagination, so while I give instructions to them under hypnosis, the contestants might interpret those instructions in all kinds of ways.

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

All psychological research is completely barred by the interpretations of the psychoanalysts. Everything happens in the unconscious, and I don't know what this unconscious is.

How art works is really interesting. It comes from our unconscious, a lot of it. And were communicating in ways were not completely aware of when were making it.

What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional?

I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

To make sense to us as physical creatures, any 'truth' must undergo transformations, be couched in certain terms or we couldn't understand it.

For people who know McQueen, there is always an underlying message. It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.

When I started out, I preferred to watch my films without music, as its presence tends to mask the underlying pace of the film. I felt I could feel the rhythm of the film better without music to influence me.

It's a scary, exhilarating thing to have your work adapted by someone else. There are so many ways it can go wrong or be a poor example of the underlying story.

An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.

I would never undermine a person's interpretation of a creative work.

I have a painting where somebody's holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody's head.

Words like feminism or democracy scare me. They are words with barnacles on them, and you can't see what's underneath.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.