Quotes About Interpretation

When we see a painting that we love, we're not standing there thinking about the artist who made it — we're thinking about how that painting makes us feel, what that reflects to us about our lives and the world. And so I love when love exceeds … its creator, which is the whole goal of art…; when it becomes not about the person who created it, but about the people who consume it…

I always ask my students to answer two questions about the work they and their peers have written: What happened in this story? and What is this story about?

Girls never tell you anything straight out anyway. You have to interpolate and extrapolate their responses to figure out what's on their mind.

I wasn't kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth.

Among provocations the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.

Statistics can be made to prove anything — even the truth.

Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told; And all who told it added something new, And all who hear'd it made enlargements too, In ev'ry ear it spread, on ev'ry tongue it grew.

I wasn't satisfied with "Stuart Little" on TV, but I didn't expect to be... It is the fixed purpose of television and motion pictures to scrap the author, sink him without a trace, on the theory that he is incompetent, has never read his own stuff, is not responsible for anything he ever wrote, and wouldn't know what to do about it even if he were.

But you're examining and describing the cart, and from it postulating the horse.

Why are sex and violence always linked? I'm afraid they'll blur together in people's minds — sexandviolence — until we can't tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, "The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex."

All you need to forecast the weather is a stone on a string — • Stone wet: Rain • Stone dry: Not raining • Shadow on ground: Sunny • White on stone: Snow • Can't see stone: Foggy • Swinging stone: Windy • Jumpy stone: Earthquake • Stone gone: Tornado

Man is the only critter who feels the need to label things as flowers or weeds.

There is as much meaning in a wink as a word.

The best writers always make poetry, whether it comes out prose or verse.

He transforms every bottle of ink into a scrolling trail of metaphors.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

Aries are just drunk Capricorns.

If you eat the whole cake without cutting it into slices, then technically you've only had one piece.

There are always three sides to every story: your side, the other side, and the truth.

One man's quiet is another man's din.

The handwriting on the wall means the grandchildren found the crayons.

I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

I love to play a character. If I'm playing Cinderella or Aurora in 'Sleeping Beauty' or something like that, then I enjoy classical a lot. But to do just a two-minute solo, purely to show classical aesthetic, is not my favorite thing to do.

I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.