Quotes About Interpretation

I just think, in every acting choice that you make, you've got to go for the least obvious choice.

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

If you believe that movies are alive and talking back to you, there's a point at which it's very obvious they're not finished.

It is at best insufficient and at worst inaccurate to settle on a definition of the Enlightenment, for the obvious reason that there was not just one.

Obviously, we all look at things through the filter of our own experiences.

The events with Henry III happened, obviously the way it happened, liberties were taken.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

As interesting as that music can occasionally be, I don't think it really replaces the other.

I occasionally experience the discomfort of people assuming my work is autobiographical.

There have been occasions when some people have taken me very seriously.

When I land in a country and they ask for 'occupation,' I always just put 'artist.' I think that covers all of it.

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don't care if they make sense or nonsense.

as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong? If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.

But that's just as bad," protested Milo. "You mean just as good," corrected the Humbug. "Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things." "I don't know which side of anything to look at," protested Milo. "Everything is so confusing and all your words only make things worse.

I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear. "Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock.

If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.

action of the brain. It seemed easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I'll bet that if he had used the phrases: Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward—or rather laterally—in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet, and Now, returning—or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my upraised digit—I'll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination.

Everything is language.

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

Poetry, like history, is made; poetry, like truth, is seen.

Days that haunt the poem's single day are like the air revisiting this house of vocables that you and I designed: its windows watch an ocean and a sky to learn what portion of the other's mind the jet-trails presage: letters are stones that fly to settle in a wall of which the line traces an hour, a where, a place of thought. What is more palpable, the thing we saw or the images its recollection brought into the mind to ask us what we are? from "Day