Quotes About Interpretation

Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out unread the book that promises me no metaphors inside.

I know I love a novel with an unreliable narrator, and I think many readers do as well.

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

The unsaid is a powerful tool. It invites the reader into the narrative, filling in gaps, interpreting silences and half-finished sentences, and seeing the hidden fear in someone's eye.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.

Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken language is our thing.

No matter what you say in carefully chosen sentences, girls will detect both the spoken and unspoken messages.

You hope that when you're playing someone possibly unsympathetic that you can bring them something redeeming, something people can hang onto.

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.

I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.

When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.

Doing Shakespeare once is not fair to the play. I have been in Shakespeare plays when it's not until the last two or three performances when I even understand certain things. In the old days star actors would travel the world doing the same parts over and over again.

The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.

Jesus said, 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's,' and part of that was to go to war, protecting whatever nation was under control of the king. I wouldn't agree with any interpretation of Scripture that was used to say that a man or a woman shouldn't protect their families.

The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me. So after that being unsatisfied in the thing, the Lord was pleased to bring this scripture out of the Hebrews.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

I've come from theatre and you have different productions of a text in theatre. It's not unusual.

You can't just sit there and do the lines. You have to do something revealing or unusual.

As I said before, there are often disagreements as to what a particular set of facts mean. That is not at all unusual, and one shouldn't read into it more than is there.

When you do something unusual, the audience doesn't 100 percent know what you're up to in the beginning. And if you're doing a character comedy, they haven't learned the characters yet.