Quotes About Interpretation

A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.

The symbol is not an artificially constructed sign: it flowers in the soul spontaneously to announce something that cannot be expressed otherwise. It is the unique expression of the thing symbolized as of a reality that thus becomes transparent to the soul, but which itself transcends all expression.

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

What seems obvious to one person wouldn't occur to another. Your perspective is hard coded into the work that you create.

Larry David finds a way to make jokes about the Holocaust. It would never have occurred to me. And it was funny.

I think that there are changes that have occurred in technology that make is that more people can have the same level of information that I have. My advantage is that I'm very good at interpreting the information.

It never really occurs to me that I'm doing cringe comedy. It's something that people tell me afterwards, and I say, 'Again? Really? I never set out with that intention.'

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another.

There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us.

I'm interested in offence and why people take offence in certain ways about certain things.

With anything you put out there, you're going to offend somebody, but most people get that it's a joke, that I'm playing a character, and that I'm actually making fun of what I'm saying by saying it.

You never know what people will choose to be offended by.

It's completely beyond comprehension that you just can't say anything without offending somebody or the other.

But the longer I'm in the business, you see a lot of times these screenplays have been rewritten 5 times and you're not really offending an author.

What is offensive is different for everyone.

I don't believe in inspiration at all. We live in a world that demands explanation. And fiction has the capability to offer explanations for things.

And if you can offer an explanation as to why it doesn't work then you've got to the whole root of comedy.

Different directors offer you different things, and it's not necessarily the most obvious things.

I don't really compare any of the characters I play; I try to go into them being very open to what the characters can offer and what I can bring to them and then bring a being to life.

I loved the idea of playing this naughty old bag, offering her own explanation. It's my idea of heaven.

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

For me, jazz offers so much freedom in the way the music can be interpreted. It's natural to me. It's where I feel most free.