Quotes About Interpretation

The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing. I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people see things.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

I had to work out that it was something that could move, without having everybody in spray painted leotards.

One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.

Poetry is subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.

A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work?

...It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity. In art there is need for truth, not sincerity.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

A good many people think as I do. If they like my work they are creative . . . or they are crazy.

Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.

To appreciate art you've got to work at it a bit.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.